There's been a lot of discussion about the Macromedia Central EULA recently, especially the Capacity License section. Most of the comments in this recent thread on CentralMX.com seem to say that the minimum $2000 per 100 user price tag is too high.
For some apps, I agree. For others I don't. But I do think that there need to be a few more options for developers that want to sell to businesses. Some ideas follow...
I'm a software developer/consultant and I work with a small group doing custom software apps for big corporations. Our contracts range from about $25K to over $200K per app. Obviously an extra $2K in this mix isn't too bad.
However these are big complex apps (our most recent job had over 60 forms interacting with 3 different databases). I'm not sure Central is well suited to big apps like that.
Of course Central apps could be used as add-ons to these kinds of apps. We've done one Central demo of a "dashboard" app that draws together information from different parts of a big corporate system and displays it as graphs and tables and other controls in pods and the like. Very cool executive eye candy (and a big attention-getter for our sales guy). But that dashboard is the only part the client wants to see in Central right now -- the rest would be a more standard web-hosted form-based RIA.
Even for the big-ticket apps a couple things are problematic for third-party software providers:
1) The per-seat license costs.
2) The annual renewal cost.
These are problems for my little company because as the license is written right now, we're the "Application Provider", and hence the licensee. From the EULA page:
Application providers who wish to deploy their commercial applications to users without charging an individual user license fee may enter the Macromedia Central Capacity License Program.
We prefer having long-term maintenance contracts with our clients but it doesn't always happen. This means we could need to stay in contact with the client for many years after delivering the application and, worse yet, we would need to hit them up for more money each year to pay Macromedia (and I doubt we can charge a profit above that pass-through cost). Second, we would have to monitor adoption of the app by the client's employees, in case they go over the 100 user mark, etc. I have no idea how we can keep tabs on that.
In these scenarios it seems like the client company needs to own the license, not the Application Provider.
One option is to set the client company up as an Application provider in its own right. (In fact that's what I might propose to my client if the current EULA terms stick). But in that case, someone at the client company will have to understand the Central EULA and to manage changes to the licensing, like when the usership increases over 100, or when the one year date is reached.
What about run-time licensing for business apps instead of delivery-time licensing? The $2000 price tag isn't such a problem if it's paying for a delivery platform that's hosting lots of different apps (much like buying JRun or a web server environment). Then Macromedia would make the $2000 per 100 users plus 20% of the price of each app deployed, which is a pretty good deal. Corporate customers can manage a license like that along with all their other technical platform licences. Less confusion and less hassle all around.
It may be a problem for MM to manage a license scheme like that for the current Central infrastructure (since it's freely available), but perhaps there could be some kind of "Site License Enabler" mini-app that gets installed and must be present for capacity-licensed Central apps to run.
On to another point: A $20 per seat capacity license rules out lots of smaller business-related apps. Which begs the question, "Why can't individual developers just build a business app and sell it to individual business users?" This kind of stealth marketing could be very effective.
Say I build a new-fangled contact manager app that is much cooler than Outlook and ties directly to AIM for instant messaging. I sell this app for $30 a pop on a try/buy license. Now a bunch of early-adopter employees at Global MegaCorp download and try my app and love it, and word of mouth spreads. So next time Outlook gets hit by some killer virus, or Microsoft releases a new, unusable feature-bloated release, Global MegaCorp contacts me about a company-wide site-license. That's when it's time for the Capacity License pricing scheme! I would have zero chance today at going to Global MegaCorp and negotiating a five-figure site license for an app like that, but after a few hundred employees are already using it...
Comments