Rev cgi vs. php

[Richard Gaskin]

Lynn Fredricks wrote:
>> I must say that Revolution is in no way crippled and that 
>> having such limits does make some sense. Without it, nothing 
>> stops you from creating a standalone with all the features of 
>> Revolution IDE including standalone generation. If it was not 
>> for the scriptlimits, every single user could fork and create 
>> their own development product and this is probably something 
>> that would hurt runrev business.
> 
> I believe this was essentially the story behind Digital Chisel, which did
> that with SuperCard.

Yep.  A story with many lessons:

Digital Chisel was a product which put a new UI on the SuperCard engine 
and sold it in direct competition to SC.

It's an interesting side note that after SC won Macworld Magazine's 
annual award for "Best Product of the Year" in 1996, the following year 
DC won the same title, effectively making SC the only product to win 
that award two years in a row. :)

At the time, SC was owned by Allegiant Technologies, who stopped losing 
sales to DC by negotiating a special agreement with them which was 
reportedly to their mutual satisfaction and allowed both companies to 
continue with their respective growth plans.

Allegiant's strategy, and in turn DC's, hinged on a Windows deployment 
option, and when Allegiant couldn't complete the Windows product the 
shut company down (SC has since been acquired by Mark Lucas and Scott 
Simon of Solutions Etc., with uber-Mac-programmer Lucas as the lead 
engineer).

Digital Chisel then pursued their Windows strategy by attempting to port 
their product to Java.

DC was apparently unprepared for the orders-of-magnitude greater cost of 
developing with Java, and not long after they shut their doors.

I get at least two lessons from this story:

1. It's useful for a vendor of a powerful and flexible engine to protect 
themselves from customers who might compete directly with them at a very 
tiny fraction of the vendor's development cost.

2. Switching from Xtalk to Java is a really expensive thing to do.

:)

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com