#OED
Bill — yes, I know a new version is coming out. What I am praying for, is
more realistic pricing from OUP. At $400 I would be a definite buyer; at $800
or more, it becomes a "do I really need this?" product and I will think long
and hard about what else I might do with that money.
As others have said in this thread, I think there is a large – probably very
large – potential market for OED priced much lower than it is now. Friends at
Sony in Japan told me years ago, when they were first geting into video
recorders (remember the old BetaMax?) that they had calculated the mass market
for electronic products began around the $400 mark; above that, techno-buffs
and the I-must-have-this-first crowd would pay the price, but represented a
small market which was not too profitable. So, Sony's early push (matched by
the VHS inventors JVC, and their parent Matsushita) was to find engineering
solutions to bring the retail price to the $400 and under level. If you go
back today and graph price against sales volume, you will see the video
recorder market "exploded" after prices dropped under $400. More recently, a
Japanese business friend told me he thought maybe the threshold had shifted
up a little, toward $500, but that he thought inflation since the mid-70's
had not really had much impact on consumer thinking in this (price) area.
This seems to me to hold true when you look at the prices of most major
software packages: WordPerfect, 1-2-3 et al list around $500 but are commonly
sold at prices under $400…
Oh well, we can just hope someone with influence at OUP wakes up to the
market they are missing…
Regds Ric