want fpga,ip cores and compilers? add 2K
Yeah but then nobody would buy that option.
...
... Of course, practically 100% of people needed the PCB, so they were forced to pay top dollar. I also meant that management could no longer see who was using just PCB/schematic and who was using the embedded stuff. So internally, and externally for marketing, they could say that everyone was buying into the FPGA vision. It's was actually a very clever move from that aspect.
Of course they have now admitted that (well) over 90% of the business is PCB.
BTW: Dave, this thread finally convinced me to go ahead and start participating in the conversation.
Maybe not so clever... market penetration is everything, and Altium hasn't learned that lesson yet. I can quote a classic example of this in the form of the Microsoft/Novell history.
Novell always had the model of selling their licensing and support through a partner network. Great, and at first, it worked really well. Novell owned the network market. Once Microsoft jumped in, and their marketing machine made it mainstream, Novell found itself entirely unable to compete on name recognition alone. Their software is second to none -- I've been supporting it for over 30 years -- but it's a hard sell, especially where the people who make the choices aren't the ones exposed to the technical aspects.
If Altium were to offer a free tool that would enable the masses to get familiar with their software and focus on the PCB market, they'd get the penetration they need. But as important as that is making sure that the "free" version isn't crippled to the point of being useless... the right way to go would be to make it possible for people to actually make use of it to design reasonable boards, and get them produced. I don't mind manual routing -- and I suspect that most of us would rather avoid autorouting anyway, so that's a perfect thing to leave out. FPGA compiler? No, thanks. But let people export Gerber files, do four layers, and create boards that are in the neighborhood of about 100mm
2 and I think they'd have a winner. Make it reasonable to do that much commercially, say in the neighborhood of US$600, and I think that forms the basis for a winning formula.
They'd win by selling in volume -- the lesson Microsoft taught everyone very effectively, if they were paying attention.