In reply to a posting on Forumosa.com
It just confuses me. XP Home and Office, XP Pro 😛 I wonder what the real strategy behind it is (I know the must be one.) I don’t like to admit it, but I probably won’t get MS Money just because it’s a Microsoft product. I’m trying to break ties with MS not make them (but that’s another discussion for another thread…)
Yes, there undoubtedly is a strategy. It’s confusion marketing, so that you can’t really determine the value of the product in dollar terms. This kind of marketing is usually employed by companies in markets where products are already commoditized. Different weights, different price points, different advertising, different sales channels, etc. all exist to make it difficult for consumers to determine the true value of a product, vis-a-vis the competition. We wont’ be able to determine the cheapest product and have to rely on other factors to determine its value.
I must confess having used Works for years, I have seen a number of changes in the product since 1998 when i started using. Originally, it was quite a powerful product in its own right upto version 4.5. I used it and found it quite good. It skipped version 5, went to version 6 (which I bought) and version 7. It has gradually had its base eroded and cut down to distinguish it more from WORD, so that people needing a real word processor HAD to buy word (ie. fork out nearly double the price). Version 6-8 all sucked. Were far more unstable, included lots of guff that was unnecessary, and I never used. Result: I didn’t buy Word, I went to Openoffice instead. Selling a crippled product is FAR worse than selling only an expensive product.