Mathematica pricing

[Casey Leedom]

Ack!  I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!  I've received two letters this
morning from people at Sun on my posting to sun-spots.  I must have been
extremely unclear that I was not bashing Sun, but rather Wolfram.

In any case, please accept my apologies if I offended anyone from Sun.  It
was my fault for not making my posting clear enough.

One of the letters quoted the standard:

price = (production_cost / expected_copies_sold) + cost_of_sales + profit

formula for pricing.  While I understand the point about amortizing
development and production costs over expected sales, I think the price
that Wolfram wants for the Sun version of Mathematica virtually guaranties
that their sales for Suns *will* be low.  And, there are a heck of a lot
of Suns out there now.  Not as many as Macintoshes surely, but definitely
in the tens of thousands.  Finally, given that Mathematica probably isn't
going to be selling to as broad a market as a word processing product, and
in fact that average workstation user will probably be more likely to want
Mathematica than the average PC user, I think that the disparity of PC and
workstation sales for Mathematica won't be as great as for word
processors, etc.

Casey