Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 09:58:23 10/29/98
Go up one level in this thread
You have to imagine from Ed's point of view also. Look at a box for chessmaster. My CM5500 CD says "4 million sold" on it. That's because it is cheap as dirt to buy. Supply and demand is a differential equation, whereby you want to maximize profit by the product of the number sold times their price. Sometimes you can make more money by lowering the price. Let's see: 4,000,000 * $45 = $180,000,000. Not a bad little sum. Let's suppose you could sell 40,000 at $450: 40,000 * $450 = 18,000,000, only one tenth as much. If you were a software manufacturer, and your market study gave you these numbers, which one would you pick? Every problem is also an opportunity. Sofware is too cheap for markup. How can we make money? Why not sell technical support. With a bazillion persons owning a copy, a large fraction of them will spend 99 cents per minute on a 1-900 number paying for tech support. Thats about $60 per hour. I think lower priced items will stoke the market. If we have 15 million people with chess software, some will want to pop for something better. Even if it is only one percent, that is a significant number. I would never have bought CM5500 if I had not played with Crafty. I will probably buy Rebel, and might by Fritz and some others too, at some point. My curiosity gets fueled, and I want to try something out. I have a lot of disposable income, so my impulse buy is anything under (maybe) $300. Despite buying all this stuff, I probably will always like Crafty+Winboard best. But that does not mean I won't expand my possibilites by giving other things a go. Chess software is unbelievably inexpensive already, so I don't know how much lower it can get. They have to be aiming at mass market, heavy on the mass. It's a big gamble that could result in a market shakeout. There will always be a market for top end software, as long as it really does provide superior functionality.
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.