Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 14:59:58 03/30/99
Go up one level in this thread
On March 30, 1999 at 17:13:37, KarinsDad wrote: [snip] >A valid question. I now see where you are coming from. However, I think your >position is a bit of an overreaction. With the dropping of Fritz/Junior/Nimzo to >$49, the sales have increased dramatically. Although the profit margin is down, >the sales are way up. The impact on R&D should be negligible as long as sales >are continuing. If you cut the price in half, your sales will have to go up exponentially. The fixed costs are all still the same. I would be interested on some rough sales figures. Perhaps the ICD folks could tell us if they are selling four or five times as many packages. >However, the entire point is that sales may drop once a competitive product is >at the top of the SSDF lists and costs the same as the "discounted" direct sales >products (and considerably less than the newer products). I think that SSDF is absurdly over rated in making product selections. On the other hand, the chess product should be very good at playing the game. Also, some persons may want to purchase a package for the sole purpose of computer/computer combat on ICC or FICS. For someone like that, the last one or two ELO may be important. >>>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. >>The competition that is purely price based drives features down. If I cannot >>make you see that, then I don't know what else to say. > >This is probably true. But very few markets are merely price driven unless you >are in a recession. > >However, I doubt that "purely price driven" is what we have. For several years, >the prices have been over $100 per package. For a non-business nitch market, >that is a fairly high price (even if it is direct sales as opposed to mass >market). I have bought many PC tools that cost thousands of dollars, and even a few costing tens of thousands of dollars which have a higher volume of sales than these chess programs. I think that they are incredibly under priced. >However, we may get to more of a price driven market if Mindscape comes up with >some advertising gimmick or something which dramatically increases it's market >share. But unless they actively pursue it, it will be difficult to drive down >the market share of the direct sales market without convincing the chess >community of the major benefits of their product (even in this forum, there are >still a lot of opinions on the benefits of various programs). As a gut feel, I >think this will be more of a hiccough than an industry shakeup. If the sales figures are true (4 million+ copies of CM) then Mindscape already owns 99% of the market. Everyone else is fighting for a tiny scrap of a niche.
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