More flavors of DesktopX Pro requested?
Thursday, November 20, 2003 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
Few products have gotten off to such an intense start. We're getting a lot of email from users who want DesktopX Pro but can't afford $499.
Their uses vary but boil down to this:
1) Being able to use for internal apps
2) Sending a "gadget" to a friend or family4 member.
3) Making widgets for personal use where they just want to run something they make on their various home machines and not worry whether they have DesktopX on all of them or not.
These are 3 types of people that we are not currently targeting with DesktopX Pro.
But what if we did this:
Have DesktopX Pro be $129 instead and put into the license that programs created with it may not be sold or used for marketing purposes?
So when you click to get DesktopX Pro, you would be presented with two options:
a) I will not be selling applications created with DesktopX Pro or using them for marketing purposes: $129
I will be using DesktopX Pro for commercial development: $499
The question is, would $129 still be "too high" for power users? Much less than $129 and it's really not worth it and gets too close to the Object Desktop price.
What do you think?
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Reply #42 Friday, November 21, 2003 10:43 PM
firstly the LX price should be 129$ retail, 79.99$ for current Object Desktop users.
the retail price of 129 should include a standard one year subscription to Object Desktop, and the 79% upgrade for current OD users should add a full year to thier current subscription starting AFTER thier curent one expires.
secondly the standalone objects should be allowed to be traded just the same as all other stardock skins are now, however the non commercially licensed standalone objects should have contained in them somewhere that they were created by a DesktopX pro LX non commercial version and that they are NOT to be SOLD but can be freely traded.
the way i see it just because these are standalone objects doesnt mean that they necessarily need to be purchased, just like the windowblinds skins out now, ive seen and have downlaoded skins that are FAR FAR better and more funtionall than some of the skins that people including stardock and wincustomize are selling yet they are being traded for free.
if certain things continue to slowly be sold instead of free then this type of community will diminish to people consisting solely of skins that are paid for, wich in my opinion would destroy not only this great group of people i have come to love here at WC but it woulkd destroy sales of Object desktop wich the sales were driven mostly because the skins themselves were free.
so to this i say take a stand againt what is becoming the norm and try to keep this as free as possible.
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Reply #41 Friday, November 21, 2003 11:57 AM
Paxx: I do agree, some of the things people have mentioend DesktopX could do are better served by other programs. What DesktopX allows developers to do is create highly customized looking applets very very quickly. Its best use is probably in the creation of custom interfaces.
Any software developer will tell you that trying to create something that looks slick on screen is a long and tedious process using conventional softwrare tools. With DesktopX it's easy. And bear in mind, you can mix and match flash and DesktopX objects together.
Let me give you one example:
With DesktopX Pro, I could export an auto run installer menu program that in is incredibly slick looking that was created in less than an hour.
Working for a game company, we have tried other mechanisms over the year to try to have a slick autorun screen and nothing remotely compares to DesktopX. And that's just one example.
Any sort of GUI front end for launching a set of tools would make sense with DesktopX Pro. Any sort of on-line marketing would make sense. $499 is dirt cheap for this kind of thing.
karb, your comparison is meaningless because there is nothing that competes with DesktopX Pro realistically. If you're a commercial developer who wants to quickly be able to create stand alone "Skinned" widgets, this is the fastest way by far.
As I said elsewhere, commercial companies and developers pay real money for real software. A DirectSkin license is $9,500. I have no doubt that people around here would make the same myopic comments about that pricing. But $9,500 is how much it costs and we have, at any given time, a half dozen to a deals pending. DirectSkin makes more revenue for Stardock than almost any other product.