From the Orient

Some rich buffoon said:

bq. Yesterday we saw people complain about spending $60 for a big useful piece of software like Movable Type. I paid $60 for a cab ride in Geneva. A good dinner is $100. A hotel room $150. You want the software, find a way to help companies like Six Apart instead of making them miserable. You’ve now got the tools to communicate. Use them well. Use them better.

Yeah, well LoadsMoney, I would never pay that much for a cab ride. A trip from my house to London would cost in the region of £50, but I’d get the bus or train, and I can’t really afford to do that very often.

A hundred dollar meal is a once a year special occasion at best, I find a good homemade dinner costs in the region of £5. (+ I have to eat to live, I don’t have to blog). And you know what, the people who can afford $150 hotel rooms and then brag about it are complete wankers; on their mobile phone having loud conversations with their stock broker at Ascot. And the whole country hates them. Last year, I struggled to find the £20 for a B&B.

The trouble for Six Apart is that MT3.0 has a really, really good competitor called MT2.661 (and earlier). It was free.

You want an analogy? Okay, you see all those $60 taxis Dave is talking about? Day before yesterday, they were driving round giving people lifts for free. Boy were the bus companies pissed off. Then the taxi drivers thought, hang on, we can make some money out of this (which is fair enough; unless Roman Abramovich was the taxi company owner, they’d go out of business). So they brought out a new type of taxi and if the customers wanted to use this new taxi, it would cost then $60. And the taxi drivers were schocked! NO! shocked! that the customer’s complained and all started getting the bus. (Oh and the silly taxi company left all the free taxi’s running, so everyone just carried on using the free taxi’s until they broke down).

What me to stretch the analogy to breaking point? I can do that. The taxi company he thought of this, and decided to keep a free version of the new taxis that let you go for free but dumped you out half way to your destination. And the customer’s said, sod that, that is no use to me, and got on the bus again.

And now to break the analogy. Well, the taxi driver’s weren’t happy and got all their mates to go round and point at all the people waiting in the bus queue, and say things like “You sad people, can’t you afford a taxi. It’s only $60 you flithly, downtrodden, freeloading cheapskates. $60 is less than a good meal”. And low, all the people in the bus queue, decided this bloke was a right wanker, and thus the mob decended on the bloke and didst beaten him up.

Anyway, “Shelley”:http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/05/14/spin-city/ says it better than me (once again). I am not arguing that SixApart should charge for their software, just that it is rather expensive, and don’t they think that very few people will buy it.

That was worth losing a Winer Point.

Paul Blogging