Listening and responding
A while back, Ed Bott, Joe Wikert, and the PC Doctor wrote about a set of add-ins for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that provided a tabbed interface for managing multiple documents called Intellitabs. Ed asked the question, "How much should an add-in cost?". As I regularly read all three of these blogs, I took a look at the add-ins. I concluded, as all three of these bloggers had, that while the add-ins looked helpful, the price being charged was simply too high.
I posted a comment to that effect on Ed's blog.
Well the company behind the Intellitabs product is obviously paying attention to what is being said about their products (and their prices) and they have announced that they have significantly reduced the price of the add-ins based on the feedback they're received. What I was particularly struck by was the fact they made the effort to communicate that directly to me when I had merely commented on Ed's post.
That's a deeper level of response than I usually see, even from blog-savvy companies, and one I appreciate very much. The new pricing is about 50% less than what Ed reported (which was itself a reduction from the initial pricing): Standard is $19 per application, Pro is $29 per application, and a bundle of all three is $49. That's a more than fair price for the functionality. In addition to tabs, the Word add-in provides the following features:
- Sessions: save multiple documents as a session and open them at a later time. You can define a start-up session that launches when you open Word.
- Live Tooltips: Hover your mouse over a tab and quickly access various document properties (highly configurable)
- Live Display: statistics such as word or character count directly on the tab.