No, things cost what buyers are willing to pay. Transparency would be saying the product costs the total sum so that everyone making purchasing decison knows the total cost. A manual in this case is as much part of the plane as is the wing! The product is a pile of metal without the docs. Is there a separate cost like this for R&D,labor,parts,paint, "service charge"? I mean come on,imagine the outrage here if microsoft made msdn cost even $10/year!
Salaried employees don't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year.
Regardless, the cost nevet reflects the effort put into it. It is simply what they charge because they can and because the buyer pays and because the competition is not offering something better when bidding.
Salaried employees don't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year.
One of the reasons I left aerospace is I found out that when a project ends, you and 2,000 of your closest friends all hit the street at the same time. :-)
Or as another friend put it when we were discussing the big companies: "If you work for Boeing, you'll always have a job. But you may have to move to Florida to keep it." And current events show the first part isn't even true any more...
That's a ceiling but not a floor. Things never cost less than the expense of producing them. 840 per page or so does not sound excessive for this sort of thing--I'm surprise it's not 10x more.
(Yeah, loss leaders occasionally, but don't look for that in military contracts.)
Salaried employees don't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year.
Regardless, the cost nevet reflects the effort put into it. It is simply what they charge because they can and because the buyer pays and because the competition is not offering something better when bidding.