Most Ridiculous Marketing Idea Ever!
Well, okay, that might be extreme. However, I’m somewhat dumbfounded by the email I received today.
With the launch of RagTime 6 we changed our licensing model. There will be no Solo version of RagTime 6 (see also http://www.ragtime-online.com). So that you too can enjoy this, the best ever version of RagTime, we have the following extraordinary offer: Full version of RagTime 6.0.1 Multilingual for the special price of only 249,00 EUR (instead of 845,64 EUR, including vat and shipping)
That’s right! The software that I’ve (not) been using for free is now only €250! (Or is that 250€?) Well, according to XE.com, that’s about $330.00. I can get Office at $70 more (and that’s without exploiting one of their “buy for less” options). InDesign is $700, but their upgrade is only $170. In short, I’m sure RagTime is wonderful publishing software (though I usually find that I can use something else more easily) and I’m sure it’s doing wonderfully in Europe, where it’s been traditionally difficult to get localized software at reasonable prices, but this just seems extreme.
I searched for positive reviews of RagTime on Google. Now, I understand that when you name your product after a common noun (Pages? Office? Windows?? Mail?) it can be difficult to place in the top hits, but the only reviews I could find that praised RagTime, did so because you could get it for Free. Is anyone at RagTime GmbH listening? I’ve wanted to like RagTime. Shoot, I’ve wanted to love it, ever since I read a review in SVM Mac, but I can’t love a program that retails for € 845/$1110. Not when there are so many other (cheaper) options out there — Hello, NeoOffice, iWork, OpenOffice(why do they have to put .org on it? that’s silly), InDesign, Quark (for heaven’s sake!), and even the Evil, Dark Side MS Office Suite. In my simple little world, you get to charge over a grand for your software when everyone agrees that it’s the best, and not before.
