[TriLUG] Red Hat 7.3 - pricing suggestions for the lurkers @ RHAT

Robert Floyd r.floyd3 at verizon.net
Mon May 6 23:20:33 EDT 2002


On Mon, 2002-05-06 at 22:45, Chris Hedemark wrote:

> 
> I said it before and I'll say it again... bring back the $30 box set and
> many many community members will come back and start buying Red Hat
> Linux again instead of simply downloading the ISO's.  I did this with
> many of the stable releases before the price hike.
> 

I paid $40 for the SuSe 8.0 personal edition. I think that's what
Mandrake will sell for as well. $60 seems a bit high compared to the
competition. It may be this is a deliberate attempt to distinguish
itself as the superior product with superior pricing (don't scoff: this
used to work quite well in the pharmaceutical industry).

I suspect a big part of their pricing decision is their target market.
In a pure consumer play, the $20 price difference is significant. If
their target is the home IS professional, the higher price is not going
to make that much of a difference.

Now, if RH wanted to go after a larger consumer market, they could work
with, say, the Durham Public Schools, to load RH on the system's
computers (the non-Mac ones). However, I suspect that's a very big IF.

With education dollars drying up, it might be very interesting if one of
the distro vendors came out with an Education distribution that would
include an easy installer, a decent collection of programs useful in
education and a support contract for a reasonable price. I could easily
see such a package being jumped on by local LUGs, who could run
installfests and provide local support to their local school systems...

But it's getting late, and I'm starting to hallucinate <g>,
Robert Floyd
Durham, NC




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