On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, David Bovill wrote:
> > 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.
It's a metaphor: eating like an elephant means taking in as much
competitive intelligence as you can, the pooping part refers to how
much information about your own company you divulge for your
competitors to use. We're not as good about holding ours as we
probably should be ;-)
> 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 think you maybe overestimate Director's importance. It isn't even
the major revenue generator for Macromedia, and it's installed base is
probably less than 10% of that of Visual Basic or the top handful of
Java tools combined. Probably less than 5% if you don't count pirate
copies. The numbers are even more striking if you compare it with
other types of applications, even other development tools such as
FileMaker Pro. If we ever chose to take a competing product head on,
FMP would be a *much* better candidate than Director.
> I guess it must of had nothing to do with the success of Director per se?
I meant no slight to Director which is a fine product for what it
does, and it has managed to put most of its direct competitors out of
business. The piracy rate is a serious issue (and at this point
should probably even be considered a marketing strategy rather than a
problem), but I only mentioned it because it's important to take that
into account when trying to get a sense of the potential market for
Director-like tools as compared with other types of software products.
> 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 -:)
The number of people that would even understand "Director for CGIs" is
probably pretty small (much smaller than the number that need a
cross-platform application development tool). As for the idea, maybe
you should look into Flamethrower, a product that is supposed to be
something like that. If you've never heard of it, I guess that's just
evidence against the "build a better mouse trap" theory ;-)
Regards,
Scott
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
