MDK 4.20 trouble

"Sources close to ARM" suggest that this thread has been noticed...

The interesting thing is the Cortex chips that can run without a single assembler line - the core takes care of setting up the environment for calling a C reset handler and standard C ISR functions.

With chip manufacturers supplying reasonable kick-start sample code, the need for the Keil simulator is decreasing while at the same time the cost of it is going up.

Most other companies that sees such an equation does what all hw product owners does, i.e. very carefully checks the price structure and sees how a product can be sold cheaper but in higher volumes to still maintain the profit. Almost all companies tries to get more customers since they are forced to sell at a lower price. Keil seems to go the other route - fewer customers but each customer charged more.

I don't think the solution is to cut the tools into huge number of sizes. That means that customers will have to look at their component choices based on their Keil support.

The main reason for profit is in the amount of support Keil has to give to each customer.

So maybe they should instead differentiate the support - sell cheaper licenses with no support except bug fixes. Each such license will be almost 100% profit, since they may be sold completely electronically - just costing some administration to register the customer, and the bandwidth for people to download the compiler and service updates.

That would mean that small companies can afford to start with Keil tools even for short series of cheaper products. And when they do get into a critical situation, they can decide if they want to upgrade to a more expensive license with support included, or if they want to pay a per-issue fee for getting help.

But the goal must be to get more people to jump on the ARM bandwagon - picking market shares from Pic, AVR, 8051, MPC430, ...

Going the other route - only selling to fortune 500 companies means there will be too few people using the tools and finding bugs. So there will be few customers paying huge fees to get low-quality stuff. PC compilers are so good because there are tens of thousands of users who tests everything in the tools and sends back good error reports. If user A can't write a good error report, then user B, C, or D will manage to write something that does help locate find and solve a problem.

Per,

I fully support your proposals.

You posted

"Almost all companies tries to get more customers since they are forced to sell at a lower price. Keil seems to go the other route - fewer customers but each customer charged more."

I not sure if it applied fully, but a term I encountered recently could characterize this situation: "the economics of (customer) extinction"...

An open letter to Keil/ARM:

"Dear Madam/Sir,

Our local distributer of the Keil/ARM tool-chain has informed us that we better upgrade our tools soon because the prices of the RL-ARM library license is going up from 3400 euro per seat to 4190 euro per seat starting 1st of April.

With all due respect, I must point out to you that this is entirely unacceptable. I have a lot of respect for your mostly excellent tools, but I believe that in this particular instance you are hurting your own core business: There is a large number of commercial and indeed, outstanding open source alternatives available with more of less comparable functionality and occasionally with better documentation. I believe that a significant number of small to medium companies will refuse to pay these prices, and will search and find more cost effectives ways to get the job done . I cannot speak for others - but I can tell you that this is most definitely the trend of my employer. You're playing with fire!
Wasn't your stated goal to promote the usage of low cost 32-bit microcontrollers? Do you really believe this pricing policy coalesces with this goal?

Kind regards,

Tamir Michael"

Dear All,

I would like to address your concerns and clarify the facts around the MDK products.

Pricing.
There is no plan to increase the price of RL-ARM to €4,190 (23%).

As you have seen we have removed RL-ARM as a stand-alone product and integrated it into MDK-Professional. Based on the MDK-Professional price which you have highlighted in this thread, this represents a small price increase (<7%) over the previous combined pricing of MDK-ARM and RL-ARM. This is the only price increase we have made for a number of years even though we have been adding many new features in MDK and RL-ARM. For instance MDK-Professional now includes USB Host and NAND support.

We have also made a special offer as part of its introduction, all MDK-Professionals shipped before 30th September, 2011 include a ULINKpro at no extra cost.

There are other MDK Editions available (Standard, Basic and Lite) which are priced to allow developers to use the most suitable version for their requirements. MDK-Basic has actually reduced in price.

MDK-Professional includes extensive middleware libraries which are a fraction of the cost of similar products available from other commercial RTOS and middleware vendors.

Licensing
RL-ARM has always been licensed on a per seat basis. Every developer using MDK and RL-ARM should have a full license for both. This is clearly defined in the click-through End User License Agreement. Therefore, MDK-Professional does not make any change to the correct usage of the middleware components.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

Mark Onions
ARM

Mark,

Thanks for your reply and clarifications.
After deliberation with our dealer it seems that we must make a choice: either upgrade to MDK pro until the end of march (and pay 3400 euro per seat), or be forced to pay the full 4190 euro after that date to upgrade.

Tamir

And you still want license fees per seat for the TCP/IP source too?

Tamir,

I may have misunderstood why you will need to pay an increased price in April. If you send me an email separately we can discuss offline.

Mark

Per,
as far as I know, you can't even purchase the TCP/IP source code any more.
I tried to purchase the sources, but were told that this package isn't available.

Marc,

Here is an excerpt of a email to marketing - hopefully it clarifies everything:

"It really comes down to this: the more licenses a company needs, the less interesting it is to remain using your networking and file system libraries. Why? It is quite simple, really: You charge the price of these libraries as part of the IDE, and one cannot even build an existing application on his computer unless he has a license (thus, downgrading to a non-pro MDK is not an option at all!). This is a sharp contrast to the way it is done by others which sell these components separately. For example, I can ask some software provider for a quote regarding a TCP/IP library. That provider might ask, say, 10000 euro. Once acquired everybody will be able to use it simply by linking with it. Your solution has its own merit, but cost effectiveness is not one of them, I’m afraid. Surely you can see that once the number of licenses grows (it is expected to grow here too, but we really need to think well before we do that given the costs and maintenance) it is becoming less and less interesting to use MDK-pro."

We were just in the process of asking about buying the TCP/IP source. Mainly as we have problems with their code and needed to alter it to be closer to our needs.

Out of the stack provided by Keil we have already had to replace their SMTP and TELNET applications due to some basic limitations, now we are having issues with HTTP which is not something I relish rewriting from scratch.

Not having the source is a very painful experience.