Plea to sell Dan's book widely

[Stephen King]

View from a 'non-professional' Windows user-

I agree wholeheartedly with Chipp and Troy. It would be interesting to
understand the balance between Mac and PC (and others) on the list. As
mentioned by others, I also find Mac bias a bit off putting. List answers
like "get a Mac" (admittedly tongue in cheek) and that we don't need any
media support as there's always QuickTime don't help the PC community.

I started with Rev about 18 months ago after finding a free 1.1 disc on a PC
mag. I was so impressed with it that even though it was a fully licensed
product I bought another license for 2.xx, particularly as 2.xx offered more
in media and speech, tables.
I work with around 200 other engineers all using PCs and have spent a long
time trying to 'sell' the idea of Rev to them. Unfortunately, here in the
UK, the market is around 90% PC and we seem to continually find things Rev
doesn't really do well on PC, media, graphs, real tables etc (and many list
respondents unfortunately don't have much experience with PCs).

Speech capability seems to have vanished from the PC as far as I can see and
media playing is still restricted if QT is not installed. It has been
mentioned many times on the list that typical users of Rev products would be
teachers/schools and that these sort of people cannot install QT as they
have no admin rights, but this argument seems to hit stoney ground. Maybe a
solution to this would be to embed QT into the Dreamcard player, so that all
users have the full range of media facilities. Is this a possibility?

Anyway, I have had no luck with selling the idea of Rev to my PC colleagues
who see it as too Mac driven (review citations don't help unfortunately).
After a very brief flourish Rev seems to have vanished off the PC magazines
and no longer appears in the programming sections (where Vb, C++, Java etc
reside), the UK Mac market is very small and specialist as is Mac software
so I really see no market penetration likely in the UK. And, as has been
mentioned, constant references to 'mac' shows and awards just give the idea
that the product is not beeing promoted in PC shows/mags (here I group Linux
as well).

To me it seems a missed opportunity - the UK small user market is huge - I'm
not a professional, but I have sucessfully produced 3 special apps for
clubs, all being used actively and appreciated, but it never seems to
deliver what I need to use it for work apps or for my wifes 'teacher' needs.
In many ways I love the program, but in others I feel I am missing what the
Mac community can do with it.

I believe Rev is a great product and from what has been written, Dreamcard
may offer increased opportunities but I fear it will only really be
successul if the PC market is actively developed.

Steve

Chipp wrote..
> Troy,
>
> Good points, all. But I also believe there is too much 'Mac' centric
> focus in RR. The GUI is completely Mac based, and so is much of the
> marketing focus. Though, this does represent the 'low-hanging fruit', RR
> won't ever truly make inroads onto other platforms w/out a concerted
> marketing effort by the company.
>
> Also, we can easily see where HyperCard, SuperCard and other
> 'Mac-centric' authoring environments have ended up. I think it's
> eventually in RR's best interest to focus on other platforms, else the
> find themselves in the same situation as the other lanquished Mac Xtalk
> authoring environments. And remember, both Flash and Director found some
> success on PC's, and originally shipped with an Xtalk language.
>
> Your point below is quite cogent.
>
> -Chipp
>
> Troy Rollins wrote:
>
>
> > Marketing Revolution to Mac developers is easy. Marketing it to Windows
> > developers (other than a certain segment) is swimming against the tide.
> > It can be done, but it is certainly a harder road to travel. There is a
> > lot more "education" to do, in order to get Windows developers to
> > recognize the value... if in fact, it does have value to them over their
> > current tools.