Why 10 hours for a newbie and 30 days for a "programmer" ?

[Marian Petrides]

On Sep 1, 2004, at 4:36 PM, Chipp Walters wrote:

> For me to take 10 hours to evaluate a $99 purchase, doesn't make 
> sense. Of course, for others, it may make sense.

Again, the thing you and Dan both need to remember is that most of the 
folks on this list at the moment use Rev as a professional tool and 10 
hours evaluating a $100 purchase in that context is probably not 
cost-effective.

But to someone who is just tinkering around, maybe the guy who fiddled 
a little with BASIC when it came free with his Apple ][ or early PC, 
who thinks Dreamcard MIGHT have the potential to do something either 
fun or useful or both... to that person $99 is a fair amount of money 
and the 10 hours are 10 hours of free time allocated to deciding on how 
best to spend discretionary money (entertainment money, toy money, play 
money, call it what you will).

> I'm curious how many hours other developers spent with trial versions 
> of RR before committing any $$? The first time I played with RR for 
> about 2 hours and then bought it.

Me, too. But I knew EXACTLY what I was looking for (all I wanted at 
that juncture was Hypercard Crossplatform), tried Rev and thought I had 
died and gone to heaven.

To someone who's never used Hypercard, on the other hand, it may take a 
while to even see the potential, to conceive of the uses.

I still don't see the downside of giving someone a little longer to try 
the product before they make a decision.  How many sales will be lost 
if a few people use it long enough to make a useful app or two and then 
decide not to buy?--I suspect not many.  The greater risk, methinks, is 
that someone will not have a long enough trial period and just give up 
on Dreamcard prematurely.

M