Author: KarinsDad
Date: 09:50:02 03/30/99
Go up one level in this thread
On March 30, 1999 at 11:35:02, Dann Corbit wrote: >People think that cheaper prices for chess programs will be a benefit. > >I am not so sure. Higher margin for developers means more money spent on >research and development. If we all have $25 chess programs, they will stagnate >and the real losers will be the chess playing community. > >If all cars sold for $1000 you can be sure you would be getting junky cars and >they would not improve. > >If all radios sold for $3 you would get tinny sounding boxes. > >Price pressure means lower quality. If you imagine that somehow the price can >drop and the quality remain the same then you are not very good at math. Maybe >in the short term it works. But in the long term those wanting top quality >merchandise are going to be disappointed. I do not follow your logic Dann (I could just be dense). If Mindscape can put out an extremely strong engine (regardless of whether CM6 stays at the top of the SSDF or not) at a reasonable price, then it seems reasonable that other commercial manufacturers could as well. Taking the opposite extreme of your example, there are a lot of luxury cars and SUVs on the market that could be priced at 2/3rds or even lower of their current market price. However, since they are considered prestigious (i.e. near the top of their equivalent SSDF list), the market will bear a much greater price. The improved feature set of these luxury vehicles is basically irrelevant in regard to reality (it is the perception that counts). I think the same could be said with the chess program manufacturers. They are priced at what the market will bear and if a significantly lower priced set of software is rated by the industry as "just as good" or "better", then it should start taking a larger market share (and the other products will either have to lower prices, improve their products, or take a market share hit). Finally, I have purchased a few chess programs and databases over the years and have been EXTREMELY disappointed with the feature set. And this has been with the current model of high price for the "strong engines". Although the engines analyze fine, the concept of a high margin to improve research and development has applied mostly to the engines and only marginally to the rest of the product. So, maybe what the computer chess community really needs is some true competition to make the commercial manufacturers hungry again. KarinsDad :)
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.