500 users minimum
by Volker Weber
In my RSS reader today:
Just enquired about this and prices start at over 3000 GBP for 500 users minimum
What's it about?
Containing more than 1000 short video clips, the IBM Multimedia Library for Lotus Notes will quickly teach your employees the essential skills they need to be successful with Lotus Notes. New employees will learn key tasks, like archiving and calendaring, and seasoned employees will learn new features and productivity tips. "What's New" tutorials teach valuable skills and benefits of new features. This is the ultimate training solution for end users, administrative assistants, mobile users and tech support teams.
Does IBM really need to charge for this?
Comments
This is one of the main differentiators between IBM and Microsoft in the battle for mindshare of developers and users. This would be free content that Microsoft makes available for all who need it. IBM charges...
But between that and cutting out the free coffee/tea in Australia, I'm sure we can keep the growth going...
Ouch.
Andy Pedisich wrote just yesterday about the free, no-cost, readily-available training that IBM provides for Lotus Notes 8. You can find it at
www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/notes/
The multimedia library is an enhanced offering and, like training offerings from TLCC, Recor, and others, costs money.
Well, if you have a product that commonly thought to be alive an well in the marketplace, and that people believe is easy to master, then material such as this would be 'extra' training and worthy of certain pricing.
But if you have a product that's notoriously difficult for people to 'get it', (despite recent releases), that most end users believe is dead in the marketplace (since they've never heard of releases in the last 10 years), it would seem that a company that 'worked smarter' would provide this type of material as a public outreach.
This would be a way to make the product more valuable, more modern (this would be the modern version of software help), and possibly more visible in the market. (Shoot, release all the videos to YouTube.) But apparently building a smarter planet doesn't involve actually trying to market core products. It means each service has to be charged a la carte.
This is one thing I like about the new versions of iLife and iWork. Apple has created nice short video tutorials for common tasks, included free of charge. They also have an online library that is pretty extensive here
We really shouldn't need to pay for this stuff :(
Making available to the public, video walkthroughs on how to do things in Notes 8 should be seen as marketing. It will generate sales and adoption of 8 via linking and I bet it will be much cheaper than a commercial spot.
Not only would this be free from Microsoft, it would be part of a pop out add on hundreds of webpages so that users would be asking why we weren't using this great software.
That link highlighted by Ed looks pretty good. Like Andy, I hadn’t heard of the learning plug-in.
i know this is a stupid question but why is content like this not linked from the www.lotus.com home page, instead of the developerworks subsite (that starting point for all new users)
Why do you think this is a stupid question? If you successfully hide this stuff from Ben Poole, it might as well not exist.
The link Ed pointed out looks pretty good, but many links does not work. If you go to the community tab, the link to Mary Beth's blog still point to the old one, before the move last June.
The "what's new" video does not work for me, and none of the SWF links under "How do I" seems to work...
There is alos just one video. There need to be many more videos, showcasing the new interface and other improvements. Something that an end-user (such as the CEO who actually shell out the money for purchasing) can understand and get excited about. A slideshow with speach is not exciting...
I more wonder what that 500 users minimum is good for. Sounds as inappropriate as the 1000 users minimum for lotuslive.com.
@Oliver - the minimum PRICE is 3000 GBP. + users and the price goes up.
Well at least I know now that Ben does not read my blog :-)
Alan, what I know is, that html hrefs are too hard for you. vowe.net is pretty brutal: if it does not compute, it won't show up in the cms.
Oliver, I believe IBM cannot make a sale for less that 4 digits and still make a profit. They can sell you 500 for 3000, but not 5 for 30, let alone 1 for 6. That's why I asked: does IBM really need to charge for this?
I'm not sure what was wrong with the first link, but here it is again (or you could fix the original), a link to a post about the Learning Sidebar plugin which I wrote in 2007. Since it seems like a good topic to bring up again, I've reposted it today. And to be clear, I was just teasing anyway.
@Colin the price goes up but not in linear fashion. Once you are into the 2000 user range, it's around US$1/user/language... go up more and the list price gets cheaper.
@Craig got it right -- this is quite pathetic.
You never know what they may come up with next. Maybe discouraging application development by charging extra for the development environment? ;-)
I wish they didn't charge for it however in terms of software licensing schemes (based on some recent evals/buys), its pretty standard fare.
Colin, it's standard fare to charge for Office software, but IBM decided to give Symphony away for free. There is probably good reason not to charge for the development environment.
the rough pricing I got from IBM at the beginning of April 09 as follows:
500 - 999 users = ¢3100
2000 - 5000 users = ¢6200
100000 users = ¢38000
Companies I have worked with in the past would normally do a cheat sheet or a quick enablement session when they do a notes client upgrade.
I am going to stick my neck out and say that 3k for 999 users isn't actually too bad when the content in the library is readily prep'd and good to go from day dot.
How would you deal with an S as in SMB company? It's actually 1 - 999 users = ¢3100.
Just as with the LotusLive offering, IBM needs to shift its thinking re: "volume" licensing....
For the customers I deal with, they either expect flat rate pricing available over the web (think Google Apps Premier amongst very many others) or else pricing discounts that make sense to them, not to the vendor.
So, if I'm a 100 person company, I would want to be given a reason why I should buy offering A for all 100 users rather than just the 25 I need it for. If I'm a 500 person company, you need to make me want to deploy it for 250, not just 100 etc.
IBM's pricing does not do that currently - Passport Advantage has no real effect on SMB purchases, and neither do splits as per Kam's list above. This won't be easy for IBM to fix - a whole new pricing methodology and delivery strategy is required, but that's the world we live in now...
Cacophony, Virtual Forbidden City etc are clearly at odds with the profit flogging that Notes seems to get. I don't get it nor do I like it. At the very least, IBM need to revisit the price break to suit smaller companies.
The development environment DOES cost money; Designer is around $1K NZD per seat and you need a Domino server if you want to do anything half serious.
sounds like the execution of this brilliant plan
