Hey Goody,
I have lost the intellectual stimulation that I believing I was getting from chats on this site some years back. The Zen of PLCs. Your real life stories and programming help where great.
Nowadays when I have an hour to spare, after playing soccer with one of my 3 boys, I sit and watch MU or Chelsea. Drogba and Anelka are real impressive an what will Sir Alex do to get his club back on to the top is fun to watch.
On the high price of programming softwares, the one good argument I think still stands is the one about the justice of having EVERYBODY pay a small share, although frequent users would be overpaying, compare to the actual situation with the majors when you pay one price (high) and absorb it on the quatity of hardware you purchase. If you sell less hardware your pro-rata price is VERY high, If you sell a lot of that stuff, your price is deemed very low per pieces of equipments.
But please, my US friend, don't feed me that bull about quality and development costs to get that high level of quality. You don't know better.
All of this is a business decision. We get to vote with our $$$.
I am from the days when the TI... (That's Texas Instruments
) rep would come to our school and show us his fantastic PLC and then would go for a coffe break AND LEAVE THE SOFTWARE DISKETTES ON THE DESK... We all where soon pretty good at programming off-line his brand.
I have programmed all brand that exist.. almost anyway. The one single factor I have found is how farr in there business case that companie is up.
Remember the sport teams. They have made a nice pile of cash in the past but now, almost all of them are saying they are loosing money. How is this so?
Well, they used to have an organisation, a league. They had players and people would pay to see them. They would sell beer and jerseys and caps and publicity. In the end, they turn a profit and that was it.
Now, the stadium is owned by another comapnie (most often the profits go to the same owners) which rents it to the team. The jerseys are sold by yet another comapnie (most often the profits go to the same owners)and the publicity is also sold by yet another firm...
And so on... hence the real sport team is not making a profit... and the ******** goes on and on.
Software comapnies are just the same. There software his an independant sector that MUST turn out a profit in the end. It started by being part of the same old package, to become a center of cost, to now be a new profit center.
One way to find if they are for me... if they give me a reference number... GOOD BYE!!!
If they would at least feed me something which is not full of bugs... I am not a beta tester ... I would understand... but like it is said... they don't do bugs like bunny anymore.
About the arguments on Big users and SMALL users. Say you are a small country in south america. Say most of your people are computer illetrates. You don't have the purchasing power to use MS products.
How would using a cracked version be considered?
Remember Spock "The good of the one vs the good of the many..."
My clients get to decide in which league they want be. They want to be in the AB league, they purchase the software. In the end its better for them to have there own licence on site... I setup a desktop and install there own licence on it and they are safer from me or anybody elses ideas of who owns the code this way.
The same storie repeats itslef on and on. This is exactly like the advent of DDE ... (DCS somebody? Wonderware...)
The only power I have is to NOT PURCHASE Siemens of RS when I have a choice... and I can tell you that I very often have this choice.
On the other hand, I also recommand Rockwell or Siemens to some users. Because its what is best for them sometimes. It as to do with trainning and local support and local availability of trainned people... not so ever with hardware or software quality.
I have stories so funny with Rockwell and eBay.. maybee some other times.
My 2 cents.
