Tuesday, October 16, 2007

10-Q

Many times I have written about the price of NMR software, but rarely reporting the figures. At the cost of becoming boring (and of making the happiness of Ryan), I want to add another post in the vein. Yesterday I stumbled upon an old document of no value: a Quarterly report of Accelrys to the SEC of 1998. It's old to the point of becoming misleading. There you can find the prices in yen for the Japanese market in 1996 and the equivalent in dollars. I am reporting the latter only. They are unbelievable:
  • Felix-ND: $ 30,000
  • Felix-Assign (additional module): $ 30,000
  • Felix-Model (another module): $ 15,000
  • NMR Compass: $ 25,000
  • NMR-Pipe: $ 30,000
  • NMR Refine Complete (requires Insight and Discover): $ 60,000
  • NMR Structure Determination (requires QUANTA): $ 23,000
All the notes within parenthesis mean that you need to spend another amount of money before you can use that product. Don't forget that the value of the dollar has decreased a lot since then! I want to know who bought at those prices and, most of all, I want to hear from them if they would do it again today.
They can't, anyway. There are no NMR products in the present listing of Accelrys. A curio: Joachim Sauer (Angela Merkel's husband) worked at the company. It looks like a spy-story, involving the STASI and the CIA. Read it here in English. The same news can be found in other languages on the web.

4 Comments:

At 11:25 PM, Blogger Carlos Cobas said...

Giuseppe,

This entry is cettainly very interesting. Are these figures for individual or site licenses? In the latter case, I would be very surprised if they managed to sell any license ...

 
At 11:32 PM, Blogger old swan said...

They are Individual and locked licenses. The academic price was much lower, however. They certainly sell at similar prices, with the usual discounts. I guess, however, that they have sold more copies of Discover than of Felix.

 
At 3:55 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi,

What is the academic price?

 
At 4:13 PM, Blogger old swan said...

Software is something intangible, something that you can buy but normally you can't resell. They can ask you whatever figure between 1 buck and 1 billion for the same package. In the case of NMR software, the same identical item is being sold at 2 different prices, depending on the place the customer is working inside. It makes little sense (if any), but this is the way it is. The academic price is applied to those who work inside the Universities or for the Government.

 

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