Price discrimination
bmelton: I see a lot of conjecture about how secret pricing is or isn't beneficial, but one thing that seems to be overlooked is the complexity of enterprise class pricing.If I call BEA (now Oracle) for a portal, the application stack is modular down to app functions, such that if I want publishing in my portal, there's a publisher module.  Document repository is a seperate cost as well.  I could buy 'just portal' if I really wanted, but without speaking to a BEA sales rep, in the absence of a LOT of prior experience, I simply can't know WHAT to buy.That said, I've always found the 'per-seat' pricing model to be a pretty effective form of price discrimination.  $10 a seat means that the 100 employee company is only paying $1000, but the 30,000 employee company pays $300,000.  It's fair(ish), and it's an effective way to scale support costs as well without having to pay per hour or incident.