OK, enough with the goddamn employee discounts already. After GM rolled out their employee discount program, a bunch of other car manufacturers did the same thing. Now, it’s gone too far. This morning, I got an email from the Stylus Studio folks about their brand new promotion. Know what it is? That’s right, they’re offering an Employee Discount for Everyone! From the Press Release:

Stylus Studio (http://www.stylusstudio.com), the leading provider of XML tools for advanced data integration, today announced that for the first time in history, its employee discount on the Stylus Studio® 6 XML Enterprise Edition is being extended to XML developers everywhere through July 31, 2005 at the Stylus Studio Online Shop. You pay the same great price we pay.

Yeah? Really? Guess what the employee discount is for this promotion? A measly 10%. I used to work with these guys (in fact I had a role in Progress’s acquisition of the product and their former parent company) and I can tell you unequivocally that the “employee discount” was 100% . As in free. I had copies I used for learning how the product works and to use it for real-world projects that I was given for free. I bet Ivan and Minollo don’t even think twice about using the product at home if they need it.

It’s all fair and good to offer sale prices on your stuff, but it’s really quite pathetic when you’re copying another promotion to somehow get in on the “employee discount” buzz. Especially when the discount is, well, lame. Software companies aren’t usually stingy with the employee discounts. So, come on guys. Get serious and do some serious marketing… not this dumb stuff.

Of course, I can’t even use this program (it’s Windows only). Instead, I recommend Oxygen for XML development. It’s cheaper, lightweight, and does most of what you need at a lot less. And, they’re don’t have lame promotions… they’re offering 34% off their professional edition. It doesn’t have anywhere near the same features of Stylus or XMLSpy, but for the price it can’t be beat.

Don’t get me wrong: the guys that work on Stylus are among the brightest programmers I know. They’re not, however, great marketing or business people. It seems that being a part of Progress really hasn’t rubbed off on them much. That’s too bad.

Update: OK, so I got the story from a former coworker… apparently, they’re making fun of the whole thing, which I guess I see. So, my grumpy message above should be ignored. My post wasn’t really supposed to be about Stylus anyway, but the whole copycat nature of the “employee discount” promotions… which is what they’re making fun of, so just go ahead and call me an idiot.