Vanessa:

I just did some Googling, and you are beginning to make sense.

$1500 does seem like a lot of money when you're a postdoc, especially at a university that occasionally pays its postdocs below NIH minimum salaries (speaking from own experience here, not implying anything about current postdocs).

BUT $1500 is also:

- the cost of no more than two (!) MRI scans
- 25% less than registration fee for this year's IPMI workshop
- $300 less than my round-trip airfare to IPMI2011
- 10h of work time (with overhead) for a Senior Scientist in our group (now this is embarrassing, I know)
- 2-3ft of textbooks on my shelf that I'll never read

For 63 fully segmented brains, that starts beginning to sound like a bargain, doesn't it?

Anyway, I am not on Andy's marketing team, but I guess the question is whether this is a resource that's fundamentally valuable to your work. If it is, the price is a bargain. If it isn't, well, then any price would be wasted.

Just my two cents. And admittedly, I had to come to terms with the business model myself first. But it does really help to remind oneself how little one can buy for $1500 in science (other than 3 Stanford postdocs for a year, that is, haha!)

Torsten