Marketing Rev in Other Worlds (was Re: Script Limits and solid IDE evolution!)

[Dan Shafer]

This discussion of the need for the RunRev folks to market not just the 
product but the underlying xtalk/xcard paradigm to the world of Windows 
in particular raises for me another issue that I think prevents the 
product from achieving the kind of brilliant "Aha!" success it richly 
deserves. I refer to the out-of-the-box experience.

When I showed my wife HyperCard a few months before it was released, 
her reaction was, "I get it. Get out of the way and let me play." Her 
response to Revolution when it opened was, "What's this? Another 
programming thing?"

Professional programmers are going to be very slow to switch to 
Revolution or to any xThing for that matter. It's hard enough to get a 
programmer to change languages even when confronted with a demonstrably 
superior alternative (I know; I spent a few years trying to do that 
with Smalltalk). The real sweet spot market for Revolution, as it was 
for HyperCard and the other xCard products, is what I have long been 
referring to as the Inventive User (IU). IUs are people who:

1. Know their computers can do so much more to help them with their 
work than anyone has yet made them do.
2. Are smart and creative.
3. Can envision the solutions.
4. Are not professionally trained programmers or at least if they were 
at one point no longer earn their living coding
5. Probably working in a team or workgroup setting where they are the 
local IT department

Those folks -- and there are millions of them -- NEED Revolution. 
Badly. But they're not going to take the time to tinker and learn the 
product after opening Revolution and being faced with a blank screen 
and a bunch of loosely connected floating palettes. Heck, they don't 
even get a blank stack window let alone a starting point.

That was HyperCard's genius. Out of the box, it was engaging, enticing 
and harmless-looking. It *seduced* you into being a programmer. And 
when it did, you kissed it.

IMNSHO, RunRev should be putting a lot of time, energy and money into 
creating a dynamite out-of-the-box experience for that category of 
user. I know how I'd go about that, but it would take a lot of time to 
develop it and I'm busy writing my books about RunRev at the moment.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Revolutionary
Author of forthcoming 3-book set,
"Revolution: Programming at the Speed of Thought"
http://www.revolutionpros.com for More Info