One of the biggest barriers to entry for LabVIEW and largest negative criticism for LabVIEW is its price.
The idea presented here is to reduce the price of LabVIEW Professional from $4299 to $1500. The motivation for this is to increase the LabVIEW community to achieve “critical mass”. That is, have sufficient users that there is a large community offering advice, offering support, writing books, writing handy utilities and generally using LabVIEW.
LabVIEW is a great development environment. It can do so much, but its uptake is much less than it’s potential. On the TIOBE Index (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html), which measures the popularity of programming languages, LabVIEW is not in the Top 50. It could be!
Let’s examine the effect of such a change:
1) National Instruments profits: We, just like NI itself, would like NI to be successful and profitable. If the price was dropped to one third, I suspect the number of LabVIEW licenses sold would triple. So there (hopefully) should be no negative effect on profit. Hopefully, sales would increase by more than 3 times. There is the issue of support costs, however with some extra effort on addressing LabVIEW stability issues and some more tutorials, examples and broadcast information, the support issue could be addressed. (And the larger user community, which are already very helpful, would be more helpful). With cheaper LabVIEW, NI should sell more hardware, which wouln't hurt profits.
2) Existing Users. With more LabVIEW programmers, there would be more community support. With more LABVIEW use in industry, there would be more job opportunities.
3) Potential Users: The barrier to entry would be reduced and more potential users would become LabVIEW programmers. LabVIEW should also find more use with hobbyists.
