Thread

Whether your looking at enterprise levels coming down, or opensource looking up - the only factor in that decision is your own market, who your selling to and where the next job is coming from. My view is hugely biased towards me - i do not hide this.
But where is the real EE market - where does the real money come from, is it the 1 license person, the freelancers with 10-50 licenses for clients, or 100’s of license big companies?

Many of the well known faces around here can command good prices for their work, and will probably be listened to and maybe even be taken as the norm. But it takes quite a lot of the smaller lesser know people to band together to be heard and they probably cannot command the same fee’s and are certainly not seen as the average EE license. I just wondering if there are more or less licensee’s out there like me.

And on topic, whether there are even more on a different rung on the business ladder, hence the increase in piracy that started this all off.

As I noted in my original response to this topic, I think the piracy we’re seeing is a result of more widespread use of EE. One hopes that translates into more sales of EE and add-ons so development can grow and continue.

IMO, the biggest opportunity out there for EE is to convert developers who would otherwise default to those free open source solutions into EE users who are willing to pay or pass on licensing costs to clients. As noted originally, there is a certain irony in that piracy may actually help stimulate this on some level. Many users will not convert without “proof”, in the form of being able to develop with EE first (with the real deal + some key add-ons, not a limited “core” version).

Would Photoshop be what it is today if everyone and their mother hadn’t pirated it?

Hi Graham,
I see where your coming from - getting a taste for something will encourage use, i was first hesitant about EE, dipped my toe on a project and never looked back.

But i think there are better ways than piracy! Adobe, and many industry based software companies know that targeting education is often the key - they offer massively reduced teacher/student licenses. These students leave, and expect the workplace to use that software, and the cycle starts.

Now an EE for Education release! Ha ha ha ha, that is what the freelancer license is i guess!

Actually, you know what… That’s a really interesting point. The large project I mentioned IS for a university, and I’ve brought a number of people on board who now want to bring EE into the classroom—it’s me who’s hesitant to recommend that because of the costs (of third-party add-ons). EE is already discounted 50% for non-commercial, which is swell.

The big advantage I see to EE in the classroom is the ability to structure data with EE’s fabulous “blank canvas” approach. It’s much more conducive to new and novel solutions that students are likely to come up with than hacking WP to be something it’s not.

I can tell you from my experience as an academic, we always have a worry about teaching “proprietary” software—but in reality, everything (even open source) is proprietary. What I like about EE is actually the abstraction AWAY from specific ways of doing things to a more generalized approach that is much more in line with thinking in pseudo-code and focusing on the structure of content, rather than the syntax…

I, for one, would love to see EE in the classroom… Does EL has any discussion/plans to better support education for EE?

At the risk of going down the rabbit hole on this discussion again..😉
Coming from an Enterprise background where we paid 6 figures for a CMS that did less than EE and we had to build our own control panel, I’ve just never understood the pricing issue.

Companies willing to shell out this kind of $ can be counted on 1 hand…they are all up in fluffy clouds of apps 😊 Or they just run SharePoint = ugly and clunky but definitely not THAT expensive for integration it provides…EE is priced more than fair when you look at what it does and how well it delivers it.

Graham placed it nicely:

I find where I see the cost as an obstacle is on smaller projects. I’d love to use EE for my buddy’s cottage blog or part-time photographer friend’s business site—because it’s what I know and love—but these are not clients that can afford the cost. For those kind of sites, I’m almost forced to recommend WP, simply based on cost.

Sad but there is more and more of these projects than people willing to drop $3-$5K for a website. Why would they if they are just starting out with ‘online business/presence’ when they can get a package with hosting that includes some shopping cart, ugly template…but they don’t care as they need to keep the cost low.

If the budget is $300-$500 for a small project then it EE is not a fit. Unfortunately knowing that EE exists and recommending someone to go use WP just pains me.
But people get what they can afford, just inform them of what they are getting with one over the other.

Clone EE? Well, EL did not invent the wheel so I would not worry as there is always more to product than just features….support, community, security, resources, docs…the gods. 😊