🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 31 Jan 1992 11:21:45 EST a host of irate system programmers said ....
>    BASH SCI ...............

I DO agree that SCI flaunts a we got it, you need it, we got YOU attitude,
and it is tough to take.  Having said that ....

I am not a vendor-defendor, but let's be objective here:

fact: SCI is going to charge an upgrade fee for VM/CENTER II.  For us it will
      be about 9 or 10% of the current (high) purchase price.

      What about other vendors? VM/ESA is basically VM/XA v3, but it is called
      a new product and if you want to purchase it, I do believe the cost is
      100% of the current price, even if you had purchased VM/XA.  Granted,
      not so many shops purchase VM.  SO, lets find another vendor.  When we
      upgrade V/SEG Plus, the upgrade fee will be about 40% of what we paid for
      it.  Sites that did not benefit from educational discounts will still pay
      more than 10%.  Speaking of edcational discounts, VMSG has replaced
      their's with an HESC like program.  The new program is great for those
      need their whole bundle of products (we probably do not), but if you
      don't, then I believe you just saw your maintenance fee jump 67% if
      you used to get the discount. Perhaps you only bought V/SEG.  Well
      V/SPOOL has been bundled in with V/SEG.  I suppose you get V/SPOOL for
      'free', great deal if you want it but if you don't, I believe that you
      get to pay to maintain it anyway. Speaking of V/SEG.  It costs $$ to
      upgrade to the XA version, but I am not sure it does more than the SP
      version (or as much, not certain, HPO still spoken here).

      Do not get me wrong. I am almost content with VMSG and the products we
      have from them. I welcomed the V/SEG V/SPOOL bundling. The increased
      revenue may allow them to make V/SPOOL into a mature product and since we
      already had both products, our cost did not go up because of the
      bundling.

      My point is that SCI does not own a monopoly on the upgrade fee game.

      I do not know, YET, what SCI will do to exploit ESA 1.1 new function,
      but the /E products supposedly do exploit the new function.  I expect
      that the first version will contain token exploitation and that the
      next few versions will improve on that situation. When I consider
      how long it took many vendors to even tolerate 31-bit addressing in
      VM/XA, slow growth in exploitation in ESA looks PDG.

Jim (where did I put that fire-proof suit?) Colten