I think Pro at $500 is a bit high, perhaps a $300 suggested retail price would be closer to reality.

I think it is kept that high to help take the edge off the price of Premium, which in turn is so high to make Ultimate look better.

The whole thing is driven by the higher end SKUs in my opinion, which include lots of crapware (Team this and Team that, rah rah) tools that have very little payback in the dev process and cost a lot to create. So costly (and appealing to so few) that they would never see the light of day if they had to make it as separate add-on tools.

All part of Anders' empire building.

The same thinking took Borland (through several name changes and splits) down the same road of adding "design and process" tools around the core developer tools.

This probably isn't Anders himself at work, but cronies and toadies he brought with him into MS from previous ventures.


Oops, thought we were in chit-chat.