Yes, they did not give me the discount, but explained why they where unable to and pointed me to an evaluation version that was full featured but had a save limitation.
Did you try to get bids from both company's?
No
Did you varify that they where in fact idential pieces of software?
Both had the requisite functionality.
Now, there are any number of reasons not to try and get bids from another company. So the next assumption that the other companies more positive response changed your actions is really based on two assumptions, there was a more positive response and the new assumption that it caused you to respond differently... and so it goes until I can build towers of logic from a series of assumptions.
Which finally gets back to my point. You don’t seem to be propagating uncertainty when you describe your thinking. Without comparing both company's responses to your bids we don't have any new information about your assumptions, thus confirmation bias.
The second response was, paraphrased: While we understand the needs of educational software, we cannot offer educational discounts for non accredited educational use. The video codecs that we use require us to pay licensing fees for each seat sold unless that seat is used for accredited educational use. I am really sorry but please see our position, when developers salaries are added in we will eat the cost of those codecs if we sold the software at our educational price.
Did you try to get bids from both company's?
Did you varify that they where in fact idential pieces of software?