> From: Scott Raney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 10:25:30 -0700 (MST)
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: MetaCard review
>
> On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, David Bovill wrote:
> >
> 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 ;-)
>
Puzzled by this one, having only ever seen elephants shit at the zoo (from a
safe distance), and having had the common experience of being struck by the
odd passing pigeon - I know from first hand which risk I fear most.
>
>>> 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.
>
I did not realise there were so few *licensed* versions of Director out
there. Poor old Macromedia. As this was there first product, which through a
brilliant "hyped" marketing strategy, enabled them to begin taking over a
large section of the software world... I guess it must of had nothing to do
with the success of Director per se?
Perhaps you should consider marketing MetaCard as "Director that can do
CGI's for everyone", and keep the corporate cross platform interface market
for your accountants -:)
