Re: Back to the Future of Swarm

[Sven N. Thommesen]

At 11:12 AM 2/26/97 -0700, you wrote:
>
>sthomme> The company will let an academic user have a (perpetual!)
>sthomme> single user license for $1500; a departmental 20-user license
>sthomme> is $3000. After one year, the (optional) support contract is
>sthomme> $3-400 per year.
>
>This is one of the reasons I don't regard ModSim as very 
>useful at all.  It's not worth the price.  This is the
>same type of situation Apple found itself in (and has
>recently come around).  Yes, it's high quality.  Yes,
>it's easy to use. And, yes, it's aesthetically pleasing.
>But, most of us are cheap b*st*rds and aren't willing to
>pay $120 for a good pair of shoes, much less $1500 for a
>simulation package.
>

Just a quibble -- it *is* worth the exorbitant price to all who pay it!
As you say, we're all cheap and like to get stuff for free. My beef with
companies like CACI and Wolfram is that they choose to market to only those
customers for whom the product is worth a *lot* of money! Their call, of
course, in a free market. Presumably it's easier to know how to please a
small number of customers than to please the multitudes. However, I would
dearly love to have a legal copy of Mathematica to play with -- I just
don't have any $1300 problems lying around to justify the purchase :-(

Now, if agent-based simulation becomes as ubiquitous as we'd all like to
see, with simulation disks included in every textbook sold, *then* clearly
Swarm, or Modsim, or whatever, could profitably be sold for $100. I guess
it's up to all of us to do the research, publish the papers, spread the
Word ...

--Sven