Analyzing competitors - In this case Real Software

[Dan Shafer]

No doubt the *number* of VB refugees hanging out in RB-Land is an 
important number and would be even moreso to Rev which has, I suspect, 
*substantially* fewer users than RB.

But a colleague who is a VB guru and HyperCard-knowledgeable and I 
spent about a month last year looking at what it would take to write a 
translator or even good conversion documentation to enable VBers to 
switch to Rev. It is, as we say in the software biz, a non-trivial 
task. The programming paradigms are just so completely different that 
it did not appear to us that we could achieve anything resembling even 
50% automation of the process. RB, which after all uses the same basic 
(pun intended) language and development paradigm as VB, is in a much 
better position to capture those refugees than RR is.

I have my own theories about the best audiences for RR to pursue, and I 
won't burden the list with them because I don't get to vote anyway, but 
those abandoning VB isn't on my list.

dan

On Mar 22, 2005, at 3:19 PM, Mark Talluto wrote:

> 6K - 6.5K of VB transferees would be an important number to Rev.  I 
> wonder how many of those users would have switched to Rev instead of 
> RB had a translator like that been created for Rev.  Is this feature 
> important to me?  Nope.  I am just curious.