on 1/16/00 3:14 PM, David Cramer at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Since Macromedia scuttled all Authorware development for Macintosh
> over a year ago, except for some spasmodic support for a Mac player,
> I have been extremely disillusioned with Macromedia's reliability
> generally.
The rumor mill slates Authorware for discontinuation sometime next year.
Who can say? Other sources say ToolBook isn't long for this world either
(it's taken two years for Asymetrix to go from v7.0 to v7.1). Could be just
rumors. No one can know for sure until a vendor comes clean in a press
release, as MetaCreations finally did with its graphics products in
December.
But for clients who question the viability of MetaCard, I simply remind them
of the big-vendor products that have been abandoned, including Asymetrix
IconAuthor, Sybase's Gain Momentum, Oracle Media Objects, Apple Media Tool,
Apple's HyperCard, Apple's ScriptX, and a host of others. Big companies,
big plans, small execution.
The viability of a vendor is no guarantee that their product will be viable.
In contrast, MetaCard Corp. has been profitably maintaining and enhancing
MetaCard longer than most other products have existed. Privately held,
MetaCard Corp. is often more forthcoming about future development plans than
any publicly-traded company can be. And focused on a single product there
is no question about which part of the MetaCard Corp.'s product line is
getting development resources.
If a client is really nervous and has a lot of money, it is my understanding
that MetaCard Corp. may be willing to negotiate source code escrow as
assurance for worst-case scenarios, something the client will not likely
find with any other vendor. Such escrow is not cheap, but guarantees
viability for the code base in the event of total product or vendor failure.
Of course there are other considerations, most chiefly infrastructure
(consultants, third-party components, trainers, etc.), which play a key role
in technology selection among the majority of clients. With MC's UI taking
a backseat to its feature set (the UI favors the only platform that doesn't
like to pay for software <g>), the development environment has had
difficulty garnering the market share the interpreter richly deserves.
Catering to niche geeks like you and me, the UI has kept MetaCard from
hitting the critical mass within the market which would compel these
infrastructure players to join in and raise its perceived value to match its
actual value.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
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