Bye, and thanks for the fish

Bernard Devlin bdrunrev at gmail.com
Thu Sep 2 04:38:04 EDT 2021


Over on the forum Kevin has been encouraging people to contact support with
any issues. Some are refusing to do so, making ridiculous demands in
response.

Yesterday I had a look at the historical prices to see if LC was
significantly more expensive than Metacard:
2001 - Metacard ($995)  [$288]
2005 - Revolution Enterprise (£899) [£243]
2021 - Livecode (3x distro platforms £720) [£1316]

In square brackets behind each is [the price of an ounce of gold] (if
someone's got a better comparator, they can post it e.g. crude oil, pork
bellies, cost of an entry level Mac, etc).

So Metacard cost 3 ounces of gold, Rev Enterprise cost 3.7 oz of gold,
today's Livecode equivalent costs 0.54 oz of gold.  Even if one adds all 7
of the distro platforms (3 of which certainly didn't exist in 2005), a full
Livecode license costs just over 1oz of gold, so between 1/3rd of the price
of 15 years ago (or as little as 1/6th the price of Metacard). Objectively
speaking, the customer today gets so much more for so much less.  Apart
from those who have been used to getting something for free.

It was only this time last year I stated how amazing it was that Livecode
manages all the complexity of producing software that runs on so many
divergent platforms (I was navigating the version compatibilities of Xcode,
Android Studio, MacOS, iOS, AndroidOS, Windows OS, and Livecode), not to
mention producing two different versions of Livecode (free and
commercial).  Something had to give.

Regards, Bernard



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