----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Watts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 9:51 PM
>
> I'm not sure what lesson can be drawn from this. CF isn't free, because some
> company, with employees and stockholders, makes it. ASP isn't free, in any
> meaningful sense, either - just try to download a version for the platform
> of your choice, if it isn't Windows.
Well - it_is_Windows we are talking about for the most part here. Some people do
Linux, but there again so does Apache and PHP.
PHP is free because it doesn't come
> from a company, and there are no employees and stockholders to satisfy.
That is of no importance to developers and application hosters. Linux is
fundamentally free, but is now offered pre-installed by the likes of Dell,
Compaq and IBM such is its importance.
>
> So, are you suggesting that the Allaire arm of MM should:
>
> 1. discharge everybody providing development and tech support services for
> CF,
> 2. not pay any of those people,
> 3. fund further development and support from the sales of their ubiquitous
> desktop OS (oh, wait a second...)
With respect - you misunderstand what I am saying here.
I am not suggesting they cease to develop or support CF at all - on the
contrary - what I am saying is that they should re-position it away from a
profit center to a marketing center. In other words - they should concentrate
on getting CF as widely deployed as possible, so that they can use their inside
knowledge of the product, and their other expertise, to sell developers the
ultimate CF development and productivity tools at a premium price - it is all
down to positioning.
Or to put it another way - if CF was free and offered as a standard hosting
option by_every_hosting service provider, there might be hundred of times more
developers for it as a result, and if UltraDev was the definitive development
environment they could sell hundreds of times more copies of UltraDev as a
direct result - it is called creating a market or creating market demand. It
certainly does not diminish the value of CF or those people working on it.
The alternative route, which they appear to be embarking on, is to reduce the
deployment of CF, which will reduce the demand for Studio and UltraDev etc. and
threaten the very future of CF itself, leaving MM as a producer of development
tools for ASP and PHP along with the others.
Which makes the most commercial sense to you?
Adrian Cooper.
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