Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

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>> Practically everyone who’s paying for software is doing so through an app store

I think that software developers that eat, sleep, drink, breathe the Apple / mobile world need to be careful not to let this define their worldview of the software market. As big as the Apple / mobile market is, it's still just a small piece of the overall pie.

> And how well's that working for them?

Although I think the premise is wrong, but Al3x has a lot of valid points. There's a huge gulf between app store apps and enterprise products like Oracle. There are still a lot of companies in the B2B market that don't put pricing on their sites - even when their products aren't that expensive. Worse yet, some don't show any viable means of buying their product on the web site - not just "plans and pricing" but no clear "how to buy", etc. The visitor is expected to divine that they need to call the company. When I see a site like that I assume that it's a "if you don't want to contact us, you can't afford us" filter.

I'm always surprised when I see that kind of websites with no clear calls to action.

They seem to violate all good landing page optimization guidelines, yet they are multi-million dollar businesses. Are they leaving money on the table by not optimizing their landing pages? Or did the customers learn to expect that kind of websites and already know they just have to call? In this case, would they be put off by a more modern approach?

In other words, can the B2C approach be applied to B2B without alienating potential customers? (Some companies do, check HubSpot).

It's just another way to maximize revenue. I recently got a Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN subscription though my company. If I go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx it looks like that's $11,899.00 yet when I looked on our internal site it was ~20% of that of that price. If the actual price is really 20% of that why even list the price? Well most of these sites are designed to sell to billion dollar companies and only a tiny fraction of the people visiting that site have the authority to purchase their product. Ideally, your contact info has value to them, and they trade pricing info for it.

But as an upside, you can often start using the software before the sales process finishes. Which is a fantastic end run around the 'approved' > 'negotiated' > 'purchased' process which can take forever at large companies.

The problem is that not everyone works at a startup, armed with a credit card.

If you sell to the Fortune 500 or government, a procurement officer does the purchase. The procurement guy's purpose in life is to extract discounts. With government, it's even worse, as you have GSA and State contracts with published price lists.

There's also legal complications. If a vendor gives a discount to one government entity, all government entities qualify for that price by law.

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