Marketing Rev in Other Worlds (was Re: Script Limits and solid IDE evolution!)

[Robert Brenstein]

>This discussion of the need for the RunRev folks to market not just 
>the product but the underlying xtalk/xcard paradigm to the world of 
>Windows in particular raises for me another issue that I think 
>prevents the product from achieving the kind of brilliant "Aha!" 
>success it richly deserves. I refer to the out-of-the-box experience.
>
>When I showed my wife HyperCard a few months before it was released, 
>her reaction was, "I get it. Get out of the way and let me play." 
>Her response to Revolution when it opened was, "What's this? Another 
>programming thing?"
>
>Professional programmers are going to be very slow to switch to 
>Revolution or to any xThing for that matter. It's hard enough to get 
>a programmer to change languages even when confronted with a 
>demonstrably superior alternative (I know; I spent a few years 
>trying to do that with Smalltalk). The real sweet spot market for 
>Revolution, as it was for HyperCard and the other xCard products, is 
>what I have long been referring to as the Inventive User (IU). IUs 
>are people who:
>

Good points. My reading on the recent changes and glimpes of planned 
changes is that Rev is indeed moving in that direction. However, so 
far, the strength of MetaCard were the professional developers (in a 
loose definition of those) and some of the changes along the way (for 
example, the forthcoming removal of dynamic script setting in 
standalones -- the original topic of this thread) may alienate at 
least some of them. What I am afraid of is that on the long term Rev 
will become just another Hypercard. For sure more powerful and with 
more features but not a tool competing seriously for commercial and 
semi-commercial development. Of course, it does not have to be that 
way and we can only hope the that Rev team ways their options 
carefully and do not focus solely on making a quick buck on short 
term.

Robert Brenstein