Borland's prices are too high?

S.B Chatterjee wrote: "Borland has announced their C#/.NET Builder tools along with the prices. $69 for a personal edition and $999 for a professional version. That's fourteen times as much! jeez... I don't see developers flocking for that one. I'll stick with my VS.NET (under MSDN Universal, of course)."

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Well, I don't know. This week, Microsoft admitted that the ASP.NET editor in VS.NET 2003 is seriously flawed and can't be fixed easily (thus: will not be fixed 'till the next VS.NET upgrade, probably in 2004). $999.- is a lot of money, but if you consider it might be a tool which offers more functionality (f.e. refactoring tools) than VS.NET does, it isn't a lot of money. If you consider that VS.NET Enterprise Architect is also very expensive but doesn't deliver all what it promises (ever tried to refresh an ORM model from visio? Tried to edit UML within Visio and tried to use the .NET types? Also wondered why you had to click a zillion tabs/windows before you could add an attribute? ), I don't think Borland is way off base with their prices: the prices reflect the quality you buy.

I'm looking forward to see what Borland will come up with. If the editor will have more features than the VS.NET editors (and in the ASP.NET area: it simply works without killing your code), it will be a top-seller. It's hard to judge their product just by looking at the pricetag, because if I take that analogy, I can honestly say: for $159,- Visual C# delivers what it costs.
[/rant]

PS: ever calculated what that MSDN universal subscription costed you? If this isn't your first year, you payed a lot of money for just VS.NET 2003 and Win2k3 server. Think about that.

2 Comments

  • I'd like to do perform a feature comparison before I made a judgement, but on its face I don't think $999 seems too high if the product features are that compelling.





    Think of it this way- if you're a carpenter, how much do you pay for your tools over time? I know that the tools are extremely expensive, and that they are maintained and replaced over time as needed. What's the value of what you produce with those tools? For those of us working in software development, these are the tools we use as part of the trade, and the work that we produce with them justifies their cost to a large extent.

  • I just appreciate you addressing the HTML reformatting issue with MS. Be sure to post their response when it comes forth.

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