markpasc.org weblog

I promise you that people come to these shindigs for the free beer, not for the free speech. And the freeness of the beer is the only part you can change that’ll get their attention.

MT may made a mistake in the presentation here, I feel. Rather than making a show of taking the free beer away from anyone who plans to have more than a little, they should have presented the new offering as a premium. “Free beer, or wonderful wine cheap.”

They might consider front-paging a product matrix showing what you get with 2.66 and 3.0, along with a strong reminder that the earlier is still free and (I assume?) still actively maintained for security purposes and the likes. Don’t worry about the extra money and new license until you want to finally grow out of that frat boy beer habit and try those nice wines more and more of your friends seem to be ambling about with.

They might even make the premium features a part of that version selection wizard. “Do you demand veal and a fine red wine? Or is coke and slurry good enough for now?” — only less blatant, of course.

They could also mitigate the impact somewhat by offering support and the 3.0 code as two different options, and getting that all right up front. A lot of people might be ready to use 3.0 and not use support, or pay per support incident. But apart from the customer utility of this kind of split pricing — seeing single-user 3.0 with support for ~$35/year versus free for no support makes the gradient toward the current first-tier pricing seem much less scary.