>>I may be wrong, but it just seems a bit of a rip off. It’s just a bit of software on a DVD.
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>I used to hear the same arguements about Lotus 1-2-3/WordStar/dBaseII, etc. in 1983 when it was somewhere around $595 retail. "Just some diskettes and a manual." Of course, they had payback periods which could be measured in months (frequently weeks). For businesses where a payback period of 2-3 years is excellent (think cost of new warehouse for example), this was an outstanding value.
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>If you develop a piece of software, do you sell it for the value of the DVD? Or do you consider the man-years it took you to develop it, the size of the potential market, it's potential value to the customer, etc. and price accordingly?
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>As others have mentioned, there are cheaper (even free) alternatives. They may (or may not) give you the kind of database power you need. But it's NOT "just a bit of software on a DVD"


You must be almost as old as me if you remember paper manuals <g>. Most of those products came with literally pounds of documentation. If I had kept all of them my house's foundation would probably be 6 inches lower. The OS/2 SDK (definitely dating myself there) took up about 8 feet of shelf space.

The best packaging I ever saw came with Jazz, Lotus's Mac version of 1-2-3. That was beautiful stuff. "Jazz -- Macintosh Boogies!" And then a little thing called Excel came along -- on the Mac first, I think -- and killed it dead. Now we're lucky to get anything more than a CD and a registration card.