> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Carl Reynolds
> Sent: Friday, 12 March 1999 12:37
> To: Multiple recipients of list delphi
> Subject: RE: [DUG]: RE: Fixing the VCL (LONG)
>
>
> Max Nilson [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
>
> >There are two main problems with marketing any Delphi component from
> our
> >experience. One is that the time to properly document a component is
> fairly
> >long, almost as long as it takes to write them. The other is in having
> >enough time to spend actually marketing the component, that is, placing
> it
> >on all the Delphi sites, sending news messages to the most useful
> places,
> >trying to get people to link to your sire etc. Then you also need to
> >consider the technical support costs as an on going thing for the
> company...
>
> All true, but it needs to be balanced against the potential gains that
> are available. Perhaps too few of us are prepared to really attempt to
> market our own components. You imply that you've tried it, though?
>
> >Because Profax's focus is on products rather than components it become
> very
> >hard to justify this kind of money for the pitiful returns that can be
> >achieved. We are open to offers to handle the documentation and
> marketing
> >for us from anyone who can provide good references in this area.
>
> Ok, well I can't help you there - we haven't published any components
> ourselves (who has, on this list? How successful were you?). But,
> correct me if I'm wrong, I think there is a very large and potentially
> very lucrative market out there, not just "pitiful returns"...
We published one component that Max wrote as a test of the market, it was a
much improved field editor for dataset's. Although we had a lot of interest
and hundreds of people from all over the world downloaded it, only a handful
purchased it. It cost far more to release it than we made from sales.
I thought perhaps we needed a timelock, but the version we published only
worked for D3 so we effectively had a timelock.
It would have been lovely to have at least covered our costs but it did not
happen so we were unable to release any more of our components.
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