On October 3, 2001 03:37 pm, Timothy R.Butler wrote:
ANYWAY: The point is, SuSE has good justification to charge $60 bucks retail for SuSE Pro (that's what it goes for on average). You are basically paying for a bunch of great books and software. However, it's absolutely insane for them to charge $50 bucks plus S&H for the upgrade then.
I'll get back to this.
Now, to those who still disagree with my rant here, let me give an example. Apple is releasing a minor upgrade to OS X, but I hear it actually makes many improvements to the system. This is probably about the same amount of change the average user notices between SuSE releases. They want $20 for it if you are an existing customer.
Apple also gets a fair amount of money from hardware sales. It releases software upgrades to help sell more hardware. What people have been upset with Apple is that software upgrades long ago cost zero. That made it easier for people to acccept Apples hardware prices. A better example IMHO would be IBM and OS/2. I think they are still putting out fixes for Warp 4 and for a long time did for Warp 3. The thing is you could stay with the old version and get the low or even free updates or you could buy the upgrade version. The upgrade version was less then the full package but likely twice what SuSE charges.
Now, on to my point about ISO's. SuSE says they can't offer ISO's because that would cut down too much on sales. How come Mandrake can? How come RedHat can? How come even the black sheep of Linux - Caldera - can, but SuSE can't? How are their losses by offering ISO's so much more than anybody elses?
When I checked Mandrake they offered a two disk ISO and the "full" version cost money. Did I miss something or is the Mandrake [and I think redhat] ISO really a smaller version.
How would *I* resolve this?
1.) SuSE provides their retail boxes to stores at substantially lower (wholesale) price. They should drop the price of the Professional Upgrade to around (or slightly lower than) than the wholesale price of normal Professional version. That way SuSE would still make way more profit on the Upgrade version than on the normal version, and still give their users quite a deal. Lets say the wholesale price of SuSE Professional is $30. If they sell a SuSE Pro Upgrade for $30 directly to the consumer, they make just as much as they would from the retail box that sold for $60!
Stores don't like to compete with suppliers. Companies like SuSE will always have to charge more. It for no other reason so the stores can claim they are offering the product at a discount. Piss off your retailers and soon enough you don't have any. Soon enough those customers that buy retail go else where. So unless SuSE is willing to compete with it's on retailers long term then this idea won't fly.
3.) SuSE should provide at least a one or two CD version as a downloadable ISO version. Just like every other major distribution company.
I guess this answers my question about Mandrake. If you are willing to download a two disk version why don't you just do a FTP upgrade from one of the mirrors? I doubt you'll end up downloading more. Finally no one is forcing you to upgrade. Everything on a SuSE can be hand upgrade by the user. Much of it gets upgraded by RPMs on the FTP site. Nick