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I worked on MS Office and I once remember Sinofsky (then in charge of Office) once talking about the pricing structure of Office and saying nobody paid the ~$400 MSRP. My sense is that most commercial software vendors want you to use their software and want you to get it legitimately and want to find a way where you can pay what vaguely seems like it should be mutually agreeable (if you're using it educationally, there are often ways to get it for free, if you're a developer for a large organization, they want that organization to actually pay for it and support the value they're getting out of you using it). It might be this (it's long enough and old enough it might be right):īut essentially you're likely to find many models of software (from large software vendors) with a lot of different models for how you can try / use / own it.
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There's a good article from Joel on Software about how software is priced.
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