Author: Roger D Davis
Date: 21:18:07 09/26/05
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On September 26, 2005 at 22:09:42, Dann Corbit wrote: >On September 26, 2005 at 21:50:50, Roger D Davis wrote: >[snip] >>Hmmmm...if they raise the price $5 that's 5 x 50,000 = $250,000. Maybe they >>could hire someone. ;) > >If someone can solve the problem for $5, at $25/hr that means 5 responses per >hour handled correctly [12 minutes to process each problem total] which is >probably feasible, but I guess they will get a bit tired of it doing it every >day, all day, year-round. > >Now, suppose that you have some other copy protection scheme that fields ten >percent as many problem emails. That would be 225K into their pockets. > >Sure, they could hire someone. Is that the best approach? > >Consider a nice volume of sales, generating (at some future time) 50K key >upgrade requests per year. >50,000 / 50 = 1000 emails per work week (assuming 2 weeks vacation per year) > >Which is 1000 emails week/5 workdays per week = 200 emails to handle per day, >every day. That's 25 per hour -- so the tech support rep would have to >correctly handle one every 2.4 minutes. But these things are likely to arrive >in swarms, rather than in a nice smooth flow. Suppose you get 2500 requests in >a day. There are going to be a lot of people waiting. I am guessing that in >reality at least 3 people would be needed to handle that volume in such a way >that you didn't have to make a new hire every month. > >I just don't think that a design which is *guaranteed* to fail when a new >machine is purchased is the best possible design, since the same money can be >better spent on other things. > >I think that your suggestion of an off-the-shelf package is probably a better >idea. But eventually (I am guessing), a solution that works best for all will >occur -- one way or another. My guess is that key requests wouldn't be an issue at all. I own Swishmax, and it generates my keys automatically over the net. Those aren't hardware locked, though, but it doesn't really make any difference. The program itself can be modified to send the hardware fingerprint back to some remote server. What's more likely, though, is that 3000/year copies sell instead of 50,000, and that support isn't much of a problem. Roger
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