Bruce writes:

> Hmm... not that I wish to discourage Alfredo, but this sounds familiar.
>
>  The "slippery slope" of tier pricing started in the 3000 world when HP
>  introduced special software pricing for the HP 3000 Series 37. They did
>  this when potential customers rightly pointed out that the price of a
>  modest selection of software for a Series 37 system would exceed the
>  price of the hardware by 50%. HP responded by introducing a Series 37
>  software price, and a software upgrade. From two tiers great staircases
>  sometimes grow.

There is a fundamental difference between the discounts that Alfredo is
considering offering to the smaller system users and the open-ended tier-
pricing scheme that most people so bitterly complain about. With a discounted
price structure, I would presume that the full price of Adager remains what it
always has been. It's just that discounts are offered to the smaller users as
a mechanism to keep the full price from being an entry barrier.

As these people find substantial value in the HP3000 and move up in machine
class, they would, I presume, pay Adager the differential price until they
reach what would be declared to be a base machine category. After they've
reached that size of machine, there are no tiers. The software costs the same
for all machines of base size or greater.

While I'm probably putting words into Alfredo's mouth, and I have no desire to
do that, it is precisely the pricing policy we decided to adopt some time ago.
We've declared the Series 957/939 systems to be our base systems. Anyone
reaching this relatively moderately sized machine size pays full price for the
product -- and then no further money for increases in CPU size beyond that
ever again. However, we do steeply discount our product for people new to the
HP3000 using much smaller machines.

We advertise that our product has only one price: the full price -- but you
don't have to pay it all initially. With a discounted price structure, you can
buy it incrementally, over the years, as your satisfaction and your use of
your HP3000 increases. If you start on a small machine and you don't find that
satisfaction, you haven't risked that much in either hardware or software
costs.

Wirt Atmar