January 15, 2010 at 10:34 pm
I bristle at the notion of the "fair price" of anything. Before I go any further, I'd like to say that I am specifically objecting to the notion of some kind of *intrinsically-fair* price, if that was what was meant in the question (as it seemingly was). The "price" of something is simply whatever the owner is willing to accept in trade for the object (or service) -- PERIOD. As the owner, he is free to set whatever terms he wishes for trade, and it is not open to an evaluation of "fairness." Others are free to engage in the transaction on his terms, or to go their own way *unharmed*. It might be an un-wise business decision to set a price too high, but it is not "unfair" to do so. To put it another way... let's say that (for whatever reason), I am unwilling to part with my house for anything less than $500,000, while similar houses in the same neighborhood are selling for only $100,000. Well, some might claim that my "price" of $500,000 is somehow "unfair." But no one has any kind of *entitlement* to have MY house at *their* perceived "fair" price. If they did, then that would constitute a violation of my property rights. How would it be "fair" to compel me to accept less than the $500,000 that my house is worth TO *ME*? You are free to evaluate it *differently* than I do, but that difference does not constitute injury or "unfairness" to anyone. Now, with that said: The actual prices that a business sets for it's products or services has more to do with maximizing their overall profits (rightly so) in the marketplace. This determination involves a range of factors, but primarily [usually] it comes down to a simple calculation of how many units they expect they can realistically sell at various price points in a free market. In the end, they typically arrive at a price point that is generally regarded as being "fair" by their customers (by virtue of the simple fact of a high volume of actual voluntary customers). But "fairness" had nothing to do with setting that price.
January 16, 2010 at 10:53 am
Andy Warren (1/15/2010)
I don't think the prices are bad or out of line, especially since we've gotten some nice gains with the multi core stuff essentially for free. One thing to consider is that MS has to leave room to discount to big customers and government, they are never going to pay list, even if it's $1000 - they will want a discount.I sorta see the case for ala carte pricing, but maybe it's just a matter of viewpoint - I see it as buying a really great mildly expensive DBMS, and when I 'open up the box' I find a lot of free stuff; SSIS, SSAS, and more.
That's a good point, and I think it highlights something that might be throwing this discussion. By the time you're ready to purchase an enterprise license, you likely already have enough of a footprint with MS you will almost never be paying list price.
As far as which product is the buggiest and/or which product can sccale the best/ handle the most volume, there has yet to be a single objective test where all major vendors have participated at the same time in an "equal fashion" (and lest you mention TPC to me - take a close look at TPC: MS essentially submits tests under one of the metrics, Oracle under the other). Broad statements as to the "undisputed performance king" usually end up boiling down to personal preference or situational biases (yes in both directions). Like in most settings, "it depends" is usually the most accurate answer as to which will be the "best" in any given situation.
As to the original question on the post, we recently went through the exercise of pricing what it would take to replace our database infrastructure with Oracle, and even when comparing costs to put in brand new hardware and servers on both sides, the Oracle pricing came out almost 1M more.
The capabilities we've managed to line up through SQL Servert and around SQL server more than address our current needs and will continue to do that for the foreseeable future. Would I like it cheaper? Sure - but I understand how much it takes to keep building and maintaining the product, so I frankly don't think it's overpriced.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
January 18, 2010 at 9:58 am
Tony Palmeri (1/15/2010)
I bristle at the notion of the "fair price" of anything. Before I go any further, I'd like to say that I am specifically objecting to the notion of some kind of *intrinsically-fair* price, if that was what was meant in the question (as it seemingly was). The "price" of something is simply whatever the owner is willing to accept in trade for the object (or service) -- PERIOD. As the owner, he is free to set whatever terms he wishes for trade, and it is not open to an evaluation of "fairness." Others are free to engage in the transaction on his terms, or to go their own way *unharmed*. It might be an un-wise business decision to set a price too high, but it is not "unfair" to do so. To put it another way... let's say that (for whatever reason), I am unwilling to part with my house for anything less than $500,000, while similar houses in the same neighborhood are selling for only $100,000. Well, some might claim that my "price" of $500,000 is somehow "unfair." But no one has any kind of *entitlement* to have MY house at *their* perceived "fair" price. If they did, then that would constitute a violation of my property rights. How would it be "fair" to compel me to accept less than the $500,000 that my house is worth TO *ME*? You are free to evaluate it *differently* than I do, but that difference does not constitute injury or "unfairness" to anyone. Now, with that said: The actual prices that a business sets for it's products or services has more to do with maximizing their overall profits (rightly so) in the marketplace. This determination involves a range of factors, but primarily [usually] it comes down to a simple calculation of how many units they expect they can realistically sell at various price points in a free market. In the end, they typically arrive at a price point that is generally regarded as being "fair" by their customers (by virtue of the simple fact of a high volume of actual voluntary customers). But "fairness" had nothing to do with setting that price.
I would say a fair price is where both the buyer and seller feel like they are benefiting from the transaction. The buyer values the product more than his money, and the seller values the money more than his product. Things can become unfair when the seller (or buyer) use leverage to excessively push the transaction to their favor. Your example is a nearly perfect competitive market where excessive leverage does not exist. However, what if utilities charged as much as they could? Hey, you aren't entitled to electricity. If you don't like it, don't pay (or buy a generator). No! The utility companies have us at an unfair advantage, but that doesn't mean they get to set whatever price they want.
Back to SQL Server. While not quite as critical, there are still cases where it is absolutely necessary. Fortunately, I find standard to be a fair price. (ie I get $11k of value for running it on a 2CPU server.) However, I don't find enterprise to be fair (for me) because I can't justify spending $50k for the extra features. Fortunately I have the option of not buying as enterprise is not critical to my business.
February 12, 2010 at 7:49 am
I guess I would be happy to see UK prices for SQL server at about £3k per socket for standard edition, and about four times that for enterprise. Last time I looked UK prices were very much higher than that even with volume licensing.
At current exchange rates, and in round numbers, that would be $5K for standard and $20k for enterprise, so it's maybe 10% lower than current US price for standard, and 20% lower than current US price for enterprise. Of course we don't see prices anything like as low as the US prices in the UK - MS most certainly does have country-specific pricing and its UK prices are very much greater than the US prices. So I'd also like to see uniform prices world-wide instead of European and Middle East prices being much higher than US prices.
During the last few years the price of standard edition prevented us from expanding our business because our use of SQL server (where a typical customer would have to licence standard edition for 2 CPUs) meant that the cost of using us was significantly higher than the cost of the competition. The reason we didn't use Enterprise edition (and therefore had a horrible job sorting out decent failover and recovery) was that the price would have put us out of business.
Tom
February 12, 2010 at 10:57 am
SQL Server priced higher than the competition? Are you speaking of another RDBMS? And if so, which one?
Or do you mean competition from other businesses?
Viewing 5 posts - 31 through 34 (of 34 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply