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Technology Stocks : OBJECT DESIGN Inc.: Bargain of the year!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Trocchi who wrote (2601)	12/7/1998 11:14:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 3194

Frankly Bob... if the only hurdle with ObjectStore 6.0 is the price tag then... this is just great news!! You should know that the easiest hurdle for every salesman is the price. When you've successfully got your prospect through all the other hurdles then you start talking about $$... And, of course, it's always too expensive! Do you know a customer who's gonna tell you Gee... your stuff's damn cheap! I'll take two of it. Whether you sell Rolls-Royces, bicycles, real estate, or used cars, if you end up talking the price tag with your customer you've achieved 99% of the sales job. At that point, it's just a matter of telling the customer that she/he's buying a Rolls-Royce after all!! Think about the scary sales path for the VSNT guys: over there sales people must convince the prospect that they'll still be around next week! Harder to sell a product from a company that might just get out of the picture in 2 months...

To: Bob Trocchi who wrote (2601)	12/7/1998 5:31:00 PM
From: hasbeen101	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3194

In regard to end-user resistance to pricing, I find it hard to make a judgement about what is reasonable. People agree that ObjectStore will give them huge benefits, but when the "moment of truth" arrives, the simple fact is that people expect an ODBMS (even the best one) to cost no more than an RDBMS (even one of the worst, MSFT SQL Server). Microsoft SQL server has a really low price tag, but the support is non-existent, it is necessary to buy an upgrade almost every year, and it wastes huge amounts of time because it's dificult to use. But people still expect ObjectStore to cost about the same. I really don't know the answer. Concerning developer pricing (which is about 3 times more expensive than end-user pricing!) I think there is a clearer case for lower pricing, since developers leverage a database company into its user base. One final point is that the sales model is totally different from Microsoft's. Havng a salesman visit the customer is a very expensive way to sell. Can the company grow fast if it sticks with this model? Does Oracle do all its sales that way? At least Oracle advertise prominently about their lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) to explain that the initial product price is not the only factor to consider. I'd be really interested to know what pricing and selling strategies Oracle used to get where they are today. Does anyone out there know?