CompuServe Messages

Mike, No… in the market you mention ($5-10K product price with $2K support/year) an escrow agreement is not impractical at all. I'm not aware that there are many (any? well I guess there is at least one!) PC-class products in that price range. Heck, that's the same price range (higher, even) as our VAX-based software, and we certainly do escrow agreements on that. The problem arises with the under-$1K, maybe even under-$2K product range, which encompasses… what would you guess… maybe 99% of the PC software products in the world? In that range I don't think an escrow agreement is practical. I also think very few people would be willing to spend $5-10K for a PC software product (I assume we're talking one or two copies here, not dozens). If that assumption is wrong, then my company needs to re-evaluate its decision to stay out of the PC software market. The only way we could provide a decent product to our small vertical niche with adequate support would be if we could charge that type of price, and this is the first I've heard that such a thing is, in fact, viable in the PC world. The prospective customers we've spoken to have blanched at that price and have said they would hack something together themselves with a dBASE clone or with BASIC, even though they have not the slightest familiarity with either, rather than spend that type of price on a hardware platform that they've put $2-4K into. -Bill