On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, David Bovill wrote:
> Felt like a chat, just some general views for idle discussion?
> >
> > On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Ruediger zu Dohna wrote:
> >
> >> Kevin Miller wrote:
> >>> http://www.zdjournals.com/sun/9912/sun99c2.htm
> >>
> >> Clayton E. Crooks II seems to know more about MetaCard than most of us.
> >> "built-in support for databases such as Sybase, Access, and Oracle"?!?
> >> "multimedia abilities comparable to products like ... Macromedia
> >> Director"?!? Why did't anybody tell me? "it flawlessly integrates all of
> >> the tools into one seamless development environment"?!? We should tell
> >> XWorlds, who are working so hard on an improved developer experience!
> >
> > I think the take home message here is that this review was published
> > in a UNIX-centric publication, and so you have to look at MetaCard's
> > primary competition in the UNIX market. While the current development
> > environment may not meet the aesthetic standards of some Mac users, it
> > looks pretty good compared with most of the UNIX alternatives.
>
> "aesthetic standards" is not really the point here, it's about functionality
> in terms of ease of use getting the job done.
It's a gray area, to be sure. But most of the complaints we get are
about fonts and colors and icons and the layout of dialogs and such,
most of which have little or no impact on functionality.
> It's about getting the
> learning curve right, so that new users can be up and productive as soon as
> possible. For UNIX users Metacard does this job nicely, for Mac users they
> feel that the Starter Kit could be better (functionally) designed. Windows
> users probably fall somewhere inbetween.
Probably true, if they've learned HyperCard first. But as has been
pointed out many times by many different people, learning HyperCard is
no picnic either, what with all its non-standard behaviors (the
separate tools and the fact that you can't even do something as simple
as draw a button with the button tool being the most glaring examples
of this). Same for SuperCard. Still, I agree that improving
ease-of-learning is always time well spent.
> >> If the things promised in the article are really coming within one year
> >> or so, then only terrible marketing could stop MetaCard from becoming
> >> one of the big players in IDE and scripting environments, and the others
> >> (Java, VisualBasic, Tcl, Perl, etc.) can only keep up due to better
> >> marketing (OpenSource is marketing with other means :-).
> >
> > Fortunately the rather uninspring sales rates of the various add-ons
> > and development environments for those "Open Source" languages is
> > seriously limiting progress in those areas,
>
> Have you any references for this you could point me at? I'd like to learn
> from these experiences...
Guy Kawasaki has a great quote related to this kind of competitive
intelligence ("Eat like an elephant, shit like a bird."). Our
information comes from a variety of sources including personal
contacts with the developers, trade journals, contacts with editors
and writers at those journals, and the web sites/newsgroups/mailing
lists for competing products. There is no one place to get the whole
picture. And I'm not going to shit like an elephant and publicly say
what we know about what products ;-)
> > evidence that the "free"
> > factor seems to be of more importance in their popularity than the
> > "open source" factor (something I've firmly believed all along).
>
> "Open source" is only useful to you if you can use the code.
I'd qualify that to say only if you can use the binaries. Access to
the source is something 98% of the people using open source products
don't ever use (though they might state that the *potential* to do
this in some extreme situation is a feature).
> It will only be
> worth money to you if you can use it to do commercial work. You will only
> pay for it, if doing this is more efficient than getting your head round the
> "free" stuff. Then there are the marketing problems: "is it free or what?"
Most GPL stuff has the latter problem in a big way. I.e., it's not
really free, because there are more restrictions on what you can do
with it than is the case for many commercial products (e.g., the
MetaCard engine).
> > There's no competing with Microsoft and their marketing of Visual
> > Basic, but MetaCard's chances vs. Java are looking better every day: I
> > recently read an article about software development trends which
> > included statistics on Java adoption which showed that over the last
> > couple of years the percentage of organizations "planning to use in
> > the next 12 months" had dropped from near 100% down to near the 30-40%
> > of sites already using it. This means that the Java cancer is no
> > longer spreading and may even be going into remission. Now we just
> > need to provide that more healthful alternative...
> > Regards,
> > Scott
>
> One thing that interests me is the complete focus on Java as the Metacard
> competitor.
Focus on Java is by no means "complete". The list of potentially
competing products is really huge. But Java is certainly the most
visible of these, and one of the easiest to compare/contrast with
MetaCard.
> While I can understand the philosophical dispute their seems to
> be no discussion of the main competitor for many users - Macromind Director?
> There are no, speed comparisons posted, there is no table of pro's and cons
> etc.
IMHO it's not practical to try to compete with Director for animation
or other time-based projects (though some of the QT-based products are
making a valiant effort at this), and the number of people using
Director for application development is pretty small (few people try
to do it for more than one project ;-) Then there's the fact that the
Director installed base (at least the *licensed* installed base) is a
very small fraction of that of Java or Visual Basic, or even some of
the other scripting languages. Therefore we've concluded that the
overlap in the potential markets for MetaCard and Director is actually
quite small. Still, I agree that a competitive analysis that would
make it easier for Director users to understand MetaCard and help them
to choose it when the situation warrants would be good to have.
> As for Java, why not work with the stuff? Wouldn't it make a nice
> language to write cross platform extensions?
No. It doesn't work well enough even for that. Show of hands, how
many people have had Java crash their browser? Virtually every person
I've talked to on the subject has had this experience. People seem to
have a much lower expectation for browsers than they do for other
applications. Unfortunately, people using MetaCard aren't producing
browsers and so generally expect more reliability than any Java-based
product can deliver.
> Wouldn't it make an easier
> transition for corporate Java developers if you could use Java beans within
> the Metacard environment (there is an external for HyperCard that someone at
> Apple wrote to do this). C'mon boys, work with the devil -:)
The only reason I can see to even consider supporting Java for this is
a check-list item for people that have already bought into the Java
hype (as for example you seem to have). But as the few companies that
have tried this have discovered, it just doesn't work well enough to
be considered as a full-fledged extension system.
Regards,
Scott
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
