njl

Your contention is interesting. Let us compare cancer survival rates. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/561737 Breast cancer survival rates in the US are 90.1%, versus 79.0% in Europe. The prostate cancer survival rate in the US is 99.3%, as compared to 77.5% in Europe.

We get better health care in the US.

The US also subsidizes drug discovery for the rest of the world. In the late 90's, I worked for a company that made robots used for drug discovery. Every once in a while, they would put up a chart showing year over year growth. There was a healthy, steady climb until the Hillary health care initiative. The company almost went out of business. Drug companies froze spending on drug discovery because it wasn't worth their while to spend the hundreds of millions to bring a new drug to market if the US was going to go to a single-payer system. US drug prices pay for R&D, and all the countries with enforced pricing get a free ride.

You seem to feel some sort of moral obligation to price things as cost-plus. "This good cost me $90, 10% profit is reasonable, you can have it for $100."

You're upset by pricing based on value. "This good cost me $90, but it's going to save you $500 this year alone, so it is a steal at $250."

I guess my argument to you is that the goal is (naturally) to squeeze more cash out of customers. But the customers with more money are presumably getting more value out of the product.

For my current venture, we're selling software that helps keep students from dropping out of college. Our effects are measured in additional revenue to the school from students retained. Assuming we manage to provide the same percentage improvement to every school, the value we provide to an institution is going to vary widely. A small community college might have a third of the revenue per student as a private institution, and a small school might have a tenth as many students as a larger institution. My incremental costs aren't really all that much greater from school to school, but the value to the schools vary widely. It only makes sense to provide them different prices.

Don't sweat it. Knuth now writes checks for brownie points, drawn on a fictional bank.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

Salesfolk tend to be the most rational economic actors you can find. If a salesperson can make a reasonable living by just picking up the phone and signing somebody up, they're never going to do anything else. Why should they?

If you don't have an extensive sales cycle, there is zero reason why you need to pay commission.

If you want rainmakers, you've got to set up a sales incentive program that demands it, and then brutally winnow out those who don't make the grade. Otherwise, pay them a base salary and then a fixed bonus based on the entire group making quota. Brutal winnowing is still encouraged in this situation, to cut out the losers who aren't closing.

Some of your ennui might arise from being too close to the project. You've been working on it for months, you've been close to it, you've made compromises, and now you can't separate yourself enough past choices to be able to objectively evaluate your creation.

Once your project starts getting promoted, can you not iterate? Is the direction you think it needs to move in completely inimical from the version you're thinking of as 'finished'? Can you keep evolving it post-launch?

Do you like your partner? Is this someone you want to work with in the future? Have you discussed your objections to the direction? Have you been expressing your reservations, or will this come as a shock to everyone involved?

Is this something they'd launch even if you walked away from it?

Based on what you've described, I'd be inclined to let everyone know I have deep concerns, get it done, and start work on version two immediately. If at any point in that process I felt too large of a disconnect with the rest of the folks involved, I'd start extracting myself as politely and efficiently as possible.