Coldfusion 8 Released... and I'm... Absolutely Gutted :(
Why?
Adobe's decision to charge an additional premium to customers in the UK.
From Adobe's online store for the download version:
- US Price: $7,499
- UK Price: $9,192 (that's before tax - after tax its $11,118 due to a bizarre decision to add tax at a rate which is 3.5% higher than the standard VAT rate within the UK- apparently because the ""UK"" store is based in Ireland.
- Adobe feels they can get away with it in the UK
- Adobe doesn't really care about the UK market, as its too small to be important to them
As part of my job, I am responsible for making technical recommendations with regards to the most suitable platform to be used for developing / hosting a web application. When dealing with SME's who require a dedicated server, we are often pitching against companies who are using free software (php in particular). We can consistently be competitive on cost for development (despite generally having a rate per hour that is higher than the companies we are competing against) - which is a commendation for ColdFusion. What is hard to justify to our clients, is why our hosting quote is double the cost for the first year. This is often enough to use up the saving we have offered for our client in development.
ColdFusion is not hard to sell to an enterprise client (When spending $100,000 year on hosting - the initial cost of CF Enterprise is not too great a percentage.
Its also not too hard to sell at the bottom end of the market - if you spread the cost of an Enterprise license over 10-20 clients on a shared box, again it is fairly easy to swallow.
In the middle though - for a client who would be paying $7k-$10K per year on hosting - its becoming harder and harder to justify.
Whilst I (and the company I work for) wants to continue developing applications in CF, we may soon come to a point where it is no longer an option for a large proportion of our clients.
As a final note - and the reason I am really disappointed, is that I feel we have been let down.
In a conversation with Tim Buntel, at Scotch on the Rocks at the end of May, I (together with a few others) raised the issue of the existing disparity in pricing with Tim as being a major issue. Tim responded to the effect that, although he could not give any specifics, that "They were aware of the issue - and that it had been sorted - and we would not be disappointed at the outcome"
So - this leaves me to conclude:
- TIm? / Adobe? thought we in the UK are so stupid that we would not notice the continuing disparity in price.
- Tim campaigned for consistent pricing - but in the end was overruled by other forces within Adobe.
- Tim was lying in order to avoid having to confront this issue.
(p.s. the whole pricing structure for the CS suite of products is also massively overcharged within the UK - so this does seem to be a systemic Adobe failing rather than one specific to CF)
Also if you're a large enough organization you can negotiate a company wide unlimited license deal. Though that would require a top a level tech initiate to pull that off where the budget is coming from many depts or the business unit as a whole.
And to the last person's point... the standard edition is so much drastically cheaper, that it'd be worth it to buy more standard licenses and load balance 'em.
Additionally, bare in mind one of the reasons the UK is complaining so much right now is because the Pound is absolutely stomping on the Dollar. If the exchange rate was more favourable to the Dollar we wouldn't be seeing anywhere near as many complaints.
Going back to 2002, the exchange rater was around $1.34 to the Pound (compared to $2.02 right now). That equates to a big difference in pricing outside of the US.
Am I defending Adobe over this? Yes and no.
Yes, because the exchange rate is one of the major forces behind where there is such a price differential, however I agree that they should be doing something to help ease this ...
Just to throw a spanner in there ... maybe the fact that here in the UK we have only seen a £300 increase on Enterprise compared to $2,500 in the US is Adobe being nice?
Fair point - previously we have been in a position that we have purchased Standard for a client, and then been in a situation where we had to upgrade to Enterprise due to limitations within standard (Not being able to limit the number of simultaneous SMTP connections).
It may well be that with the changes that have been made in 8, that enterprise is needed less than it was with 7. (I haven't been able to find a detailed breakdown of what the restrictions are in standard - as far as I'm aware, to test this, we would have to purchase a standard licence)
@Darth:
We are not a large enough organisation to do that - we are primarily a development company - and we host the applications we have built for clients.
@Andy:
Hi Andy
All I ask is to be able to purchase the downloadable version from the US store for the same price as someone within the US. Yes I realise there may be issues with Tax etc. - but there are plenty of international retailers who manage to cope.
Its hardly my definition of "Nice" - "We are not going to be as much nastier to you than to them as we were in the past - although we will still be nastier to you than we are to them, and be nastier to you in the process" ;-)
I had that same question - how much volume can I support with the standard version before I need to upgrade. I was referred here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf8_...
Here is a feature comparison:
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf8_...
In short - I read that above 100 - 150 concurrent users level (approx 5 virtual users) you're going to have scalability issues.
Cheers,
David
I'd already looked at the feature comparison - I would need more detail than is given in there for the "restricted features" - does that mean there is only one thread available which is shared across all enterprise features? Or one thread for each type?
For instance, if I'm using the TCP/IP socket gateway for processing FTP file uploads, does this mean I can't generate a PDF until the file upload is finished? (This is functionality I am looking at using for a client application I am in the process of speccing - where I am quoting against an existing supplier who is using using PHP - the additional cost for Enterprise (if required) will make our first year hosting costs almost double those of our competitor...)