(2002-10-01) Groove Platform Pricing

I was just thinking about Ray Ozzie's writing about software platforms, and the pricing of Groove. I've concluded (duh) that he's basically practicing Price Discrimination. He sets of public price, he'll probably do a couple big visible validating deals at a deep discount, then he'll sell a bunch of enterprise deals, while a scattering of Free Agent types pay up, then over time the price of the runtime will probably drop to 0, or it will simply be unenforced, like the Netscape browser.

The big risk is that he'll get leapfrogged by someone else who starts out with a zero-cost runtime and hits ubiquity faster, jumpstarting a Software Ecosystem. But I'm not sure that's possible without lots of cheap/stupid investment dollars available.

But I could be wrong.