At 5:40 PM 8/14/95, Chris Barnes wrote:
 
> We very nearly lost ALL Lsoft products for this
>year because the unix bigots tend to love the freebe products (never
>mind performance).  $550 isn't a 'only costs' here anymore.  It gets
>compared to other software that's free (fair or not).
 
        The only freebie that can remotely compare to Listserv is listproc
6.0c.  I have used both, and am now VERY much in the listserv camp.
 
        Management love to point out hidden costs, so throw this back at
them:  I spent about an hour per week just supporting configuration changes
from list owners -- listproc doesn't let owners configure their own lists.
I spent an average of two hours per week (really about 8 hours once a
month) fixing listproc when it broke.  So, let's be conservative and say
that a person familiar with listproc would spend 2 hours per week to
maintain it.  At the moment I spend an average of about 30 minutes a week
doing overall listserv maintainence, and that's mostly from installing new
versions of the software every so often, and creating new lists (which
takes about 5 minutes).
 
Figuring that the company I work for charges $175 an hour for my time,
which is cheaper -- hiring a listproc expert or getting a program that
works?
 
Oh, and did I mention that before I was really familiar with listproc I
probably spent 4 hours a week on it, excluding the first week when I spent
15 hours getting the first list to work.  Time is money -- tell your
accountants that.
 
 
Lee Silverman     [log in to unmask]      http://www.netspace.org/users/lee/
    Someday we're going to look back on all this and tape over it.