Flex Released, but It's Not a Flash Killer

“Flex presentation server pricing starts at $12,000 for two CPUs and includes annual maintenance. Special pricing is available for ISVs and discounts are available to government and educational organizations in certain regions.” [1]

Unfortunately, although Flex is 10 times cooler than Flash, it is 30 times as expensive. This is quite unfortunate, since Flex is finally a decent Flash authoring environment, but it won't take off because someone at Macromedia decided to get greedy. Yet another example of Macromedia execs squandering great technology.

[1] http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/buy/

 

4 Comments

  • I'm not sure I can see "someone decided to get greedy", but you *do* win the Snazziest Thread Title Of The Day award there, made me chuckle.... 8)



    jd/mm

  • Damn! I wish I would have come up with a "flash"-y title for my flex post ;).



    I agree, the price point will be the killer piece for this product. There were a few rumblings of this in the beta lists and there were a few ideas thrown around for the MM guys to mull over (i.e. single CPU license, flex lite, etc.).



    The goal of the app is and has been to target Enterprise development shops.



    This being said the price was set with the theory that ROI you would get by using Flex as opposed to using FlashMX would justify its price. This maybe true or it may not be.



  • Yah, JD, greedy probably connotates a bit much (I don't think they had evil intentions). Regardless, someone thought they would make more money at 12G per copy instead of $400. If the Flex team is listening, what they should definately consider doing is offering a $400 version of Flex with Brady that doesn't have all the server side dependancy crap. Flash doesn't need a server install, why should Flex?

  • fwiw, I've been hearing internal talk all along along the lines of what you suggest, but the first goal has been to get the 1.0 out to that big-revenue target audience, and handle any forking after that. I can't speak for the team, but I wouldn't be surprised if a stronger statement-of-intent hit the website soon, if that (admittedly loose and vague) context is of any help....



    jd/mm

Comments have been disabled for this content.