Keep It Stupid, Stupid!

June 25, 2010 by Dave Haynes

The people at MediaSignage are in that race to zero game on pricing that I think can only end badly for small companies, but I suppose we shall see on that.

Now and then I poke around their website and see what the California-based company is doing. The hosted product appears to have some nice features, and I like some of the cartoon video introduction stuff on the site.

But this is also the company behind the worst digital signage demos ever – no contest there – and they cannot, just cannot, make something as simple as pricing actually simple.

My Inbox had a note Thursday proclaiming: “WOW – MediaSignage.com offers FREE unlimited Digital Signage licenses for one year!”

Wow!!!

Ok, now what does that actually mean? So I clicked through and went once again to the company’s pricing page, to once again try to figure out what things cost. Gave up after a while.

It says FREE all over the place, but there are qualifiers. It looks like you pay more per unit for two than you do for one. Storage factors in.  And on and on.

My opinion: if your game is the entry-level marketplace filled with unsophisticated buyers, a simple pricing formula actually has to be simple. This is not. It’s convoluted and irritating.

And yelling FREE at every turn, when in most cases it’s cheap but not free, isn’t a particularly wise marketing approach when monster companies like NEC provide the same hosted software platform for free, and VUKUNET really is free.  And nobody will worry if NEC will be around in a year.