Flashmagazine on Flex

“...Macromedia used to have a product that did well at the medium/big enterprise - Macromedia Generator. The Generator codebase was getting old and hard to extend and many of it's functions could easily be done using clientside Flash. Due to that, Macromedia discontinued the product (no sales or support) and they had nothing new to replace it with. They could have kept Generator there without doing anything with it and now claimed Flex to be the successor. By not doing this, they caused a lot of frustration with the enterprises that had put their bets on Generator.

There has been some discussion about the pricing of Flex. We don't think $12000 is a lot for enterprice companies. This is not a high volume product like Flash or Dreamweaver and its feature set is great. Let's just hope the enterprises forget fast and that Macomedia will not change the entire API for each new release like they've gotten sort of a reputation for? Some of these companies also bought Generator for the enterprice price of almost $40000 just to see the price sliced to one tenth the month after. A few months later, Generator was discontinued. Now Macromedia will try to sell Flex to the same companies. That could be a hard sell, despite the rave reviews. “

Well, SWFSource.NET will technically be able to do more than Flex and Generator combined (since it supports direct writing and reading of the SWF format itself), and the API isn't going to change every release, so if you want to dish out $40,000 to us instead, we'll gladly take your money. However, we realize that the only trees from which cash grow are planted in a secure area in Redmond, WA, so you can expect a far more reasonable price tag than Laszlo, Generator, or Flex.

[1] http://www.flashmagazine.com/html/960.htm

6 Comments

  • I am a former member of Team Macromedia (and before that evangelist) for Generator so I know it well :) The reasons why Generator was discontined have never been released, maybe it was for the reasons outlined or maybe it was that the new technologies in MX (Flash Remoting for example) ment that Generator had become redundant.



    The pricing issue for Generator was a cause of much concern and confusion. Pricing for Flex however is fixed so enterprise customers who went through the Generator pricing issues should not have concerns.



    Generator and Flex are great products, however while they are server products for creating Flash content, they are different beasts. I am sure that customers are aware of the differences, and know how much more flexiable and advanced Flex is now. I have not heard anywhere that Macromedia ais calling Flex a successor to Generator, its just the natural next step.

  • I agree, Generator is a completely different product than Flex, what I found most intersting was their comments about companies paying $40,000 for Generator only to have the price slashed shortly thereafter. JD has hinted that Macromedia may be releasing a ~$400 version of Flex along with Brady... wouldn't that just tick the hell out of you if you had bought Generator for $40,000 and then saw the price slashed and then you sucked it up and bought Flex for $12,000 (or another $40,000 if your deployment was large enough to require a few servers) and then saw the price of Flex slashed to a couple hundred bucks? :-)

  • Hi,



    I am not sure what post of JD you are referring to, but I can assure you there are no discussions at Macromedia about dropping the price of Flex to a few hundred bucks! There are discussions that *over time* we will offer other editions perhaps that address other use cases and users than we have targetted initially.



    ColdFusion has an enterprise and a standard edition. WebSphere has a Advanced and an Express edition. Lazlo has a very high priced and a low priced edition. And so on and so forth. This isn't a big secret. We wanted to nail the primary user/use case with the 1.0 release--hard to get anything right if you try to please all people right out the gate with a 1.0 product which by definition isn't mature. (and this is a common approach--see WebSphere, WebLogic, Laszlo, etc.) But over time we expect there to be a lot of interest and opportunity for a wider range of use cases and for smaller businesses and we are going to keep looking at the best way to offer the product to more customers. We don't have any specific editioning plan yet, but we are working on it. But what we are most focused right now on is working closely with early customers of Flex to make sure they are successfull and that we get the learning we need to make sure we nail 1.X and 2.0 and can scale this product to more and more users.



    HTH,

    David







  • PS: David, how is the .NET version of Flex coming? Any word on a timeframe yet?

  • "JD has hinted that Macromedia may be releasing a ~$400 version of Flex along with Brady"



    whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa... you've got to go to what the Flex team writes on their part of the website, instead of changing the informal words of an individual like that...! ;-)



    (I said that I myself had heard people discussing various ideas along similar lines, and that I wouldn't be surprised if we-all eventually heard word about such a path, but that's a far cry from saying myself that something may hit the street, much less at a particular pricepoint and delivery date!)



    Jesse, if you can pull it off and satisfy a different set of people and get a decent return for yourself, then that's great, more power to ya, it's a better thing all around.



    jd/mm

  • Yah JD, I posted the link to your comments just to clear up any confusion.

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