For those of you who aren’t tired of hearing about software pricing, BEA announced on Tuesday that dual-core chips will count as a single CPU for licensing purposes. The company will continue to charge a 25% premium for chips with more than 2 cores.
Why do I keep harping on this? Because it’s a great example of an industry pricing practice that wasn’t really gounded in value. It was just accepted until the ground shifted. Software pricing is hard, and this change isn’t making things any easier, but vendors need new models (subscriptions, usage, users, etc).