BSD and HP9K700 standalones . . . ?

[Michael Kann]

I came across an old website with interviews of persons who had started their own software companies, Scott Raney among them. One of the questions was whether he had met any of his competitors face-to-face. He said, "no, in fact I never met any of my employees either."

As a model for a software company I think Metacard was a one-off. It ain't ever gonna happen again in this universe.

If you want a program that runs on every operating system you've ever heard of, try REBOL. 

There's a show on public radio in the US called "Whad'ya Know?" At the beginning of the show one of the opening lines is "If you don't like the show, get your own." 

--- On Mon, 1/18/10, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
> Subject: Re: BSD and HP9K700 standalones . . . ?
> To: "How to use Revolution" <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
> Date: Monday, January 18, 2010, 9:37 AM
> 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
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