>People keep writing these kinds of stories on this list. As a vendor, the
>primary take-home lesson that I'm slowly getting from all of this is: if
>people are willing to put up with such increases, we've gotta raise our
>prices!

>Wirt Atmar

No, that's not the message.  If people check their third-party vendor policies
before upgrading, they sometimes make other choices based on the
answers.  One answer I see among companies I'm familiar with is to put
off the upgrade as long as possible, while looking for ways to get more
out of the current machines.

Another answer is one I'm seeing right now, at a company which is still on
a Series 70 because of the outrageous price of an upgrade for a certain
report writer (guess which one!).  Faced with an imminent Y2K problem
and concern about running the company on unsupported hardware and
software, the decision was finally made to upgrade to a RISC processor.
The solution to the outrageously-priced report writer is to dump it, even
though that means identifying, deciphering, and rewriting about 16 years'
worth of reports (probably in QueryCalc).

This is not the first client I've had that finally had enough.  Another
company had the whole package, transaction processor and screen
formatter as well as the report writer.  It was their only language, but
they dumped it rather than pay the upgrade cost, and rewrote
everything.

Some managers do look beyond the current quarter and realize that
it won't take more than a year or two to recover the cost of replacing
exorbitantly-priced tools, and start showing savings.

Cecile Chi