BSD and HP9K700 standalones . . . ?

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:
 > RunRev's 'abandonment' of less popular platforms may have little
 > to do with business as such, and more to do with the changing
 > dynamic of siingle person to "team".

With all due respect, this describes the relationship between a 
company's size and its mission in terms that are exactly backwards.

Moreover, the premise that MetaCard Corp. was a one-man show is 
incorrect. AFAIK even during most of its Unix-only years he had at least 
one employee to help run things.  But once he started the port to 
Windows he used contractors regularly, and when he ported to Mac he 
expanded that contractor pool.  From my discussions with him it seemed 
his team size varied between three and five people much of the time 
since I started working with the engine in '97.

But it's also very much the case that the missions of MetaCard Corp. and 
RunRev Ltd. are quite different:


MC sold for $995, with upgrades at $485.  Period.  There was only one 
version available, and that was its price.

This pricing helped keep support costs down, acting as a sort of filter 
which pretty much eliminated all but professional developers from his 
customer base.

Dr. Raney's model was based on high margins over high unit sales, and 
although he did rather well with site licenses to some rather large 
companies, there was a limit to the potential for unit sales growth at 
that price point.

That worked well enough for him, but Kevin Miller saw a different 
opportunity and formed RunRev Ltd. to answer this question:  Can we take 
this engine to the masses?

The myriad ways this different mission shapes day-to-day operations in a 
company cannot be overstated.


With price points ranging from half of what MC Corp. asked down to zero, 
RunRev Ltd. must do things very differently than MC did.

On the marketing side, MC Corp. could afford to pretty much coast on 
word-of-mouth, since the audience he was aiming at was much smaller and 
a much more specific target to hit.  RunRev, on the other hand, has to 
appeal to orders of magnitude more people to make the same level of 
operational profit.  Those of you who run your own businesses appreciate 
that effective marketing requires resources, not always cash but always 
a fair bit of time, and that means people.

On the technical side, as Stephen noted the engine was much simpler back 
when Raney managed it.  For example, all OS appearances were emulated, 
and he began moving beyond appearance emulation only for OS X by the 
time he sold the company, while RunRev has moved it forward to adopt OS 
appearances across the board.  If they did their job well this may seem 
a simple thing, but what it does to the complexity of the underlying 
object structures is not trivial, and it's only one modest example of 
the things they've added, along with modern buffering, antialiasing, and 
a few hundred other features and fixes that are very difficult (read 
"costly") to implement across three platforms.

The dynamics of these differences are described well in Geoff Moore's 
book "Crossing the Chasm" (a must-read, IMO, for any tech business 
owner), and Raney once wrote to me that his model would never have taken 
the engine across that chasm between tech-savvy "early adopters" to the 
masses.


Consider this:  how much smaller would the membership of this use-rev 
list be if the price point had been maintained at $995?

Sure, MC's trial method was limited by number of script lines rather 
than by time as Rev's is (and before the advent of RevMedia as a free 
product I used to feel that Raney's model was a better one for a product 
as complex as Rev), but how much work can one do in 10 lines?

Some especially clever folks got along quite well with the 10-line limit 
in the MC trial version, but such savvy folks are relatively few.

RunRev can reach far more people by giving away the whole engine in 
RevMedia, and newcomers experimenting with it don't need to be nearly as 
clever as they used to with MC in working around the 10-line limit; 
RevMedia lets newcomers built a great many very useful things at a 
fraction of the effort MC used to require.

But all of this takes a lot of time to deliver, more time than just 
three people will have.  It takes a team about the size of what RunRev 
has now; heck, they might do even better with more, but the constant 
business challenge of profitability requires them to use their human 
resources very carefully.


In the early days of RunRev I had no shortage of opinions about how they 
might refine their operations to better support their model.  But in 
recent years, esp. with v3.0 forward, I now have no shortage of opinions 
about how well they're doing toward that end.

They've come a long way, and have delivered a great many features which 
serve my customers and clients well, all for a tiny sliver of what it 
would take me to get those on my own.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
  revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv