Richard MacLemale wrote:
> Competition
> Everyone talks about Director being MetaCard's competition, but I
> don't really see it that way. Director is great at doing
> animation-type programs... I don't see MetaCard touching it for
> doing animations, no matter what features are added. But Director
> sucks at pretty much everything else.
MetaCard has quite capable animation support. But it is a generalist,
not an animation specialist. It makes sense to try to grab the portion
of the market that is using Director for things which Director is not
great at, but you would need to be a braver man than I to try taking on
Director head to head at animation.
> I think MetaCard's competition is Virtual Basic (PC) and Real
> Basic (Mac.)
Absolutely. Some time ago, unless memory serves me wrong, Scott was
asking for feedback on the question of how to market Metacard. The
problem being that Metacard doesn't have the street cred among
programmers raised on C and perl, and other users don't quite know what
to do with it.
It seems to me that Metacard falls neatly into the niche currently taken
by VB and formerly Delphi. Its an application deveolopment system. With
a change in marketing direction, it could be aimed squarely at the
market which currently uses VB.
"It is like VB, but faster, sleeker, friendlier, and multi-platform!"
Lets face facts: as much as we all love Metacard, it hasn't exactly
taken the world by storm, no matter how much it deserves too. How many
registered users are there? I see the same names time and time again on
the mailing list, which is good because it proves that you can make
commercial software with Metacard, but its also bad because its the same
people and very few new users.
The way I see it, even if Metacard manages to capture a large slice of
the Director/Toolbook market, it will still only be a large fish in a
small pond. Potentially, if Metacard managed to capture even 1% of 1% of
the VB market, it would be huge!
> Price
> To a serious software developer, MetaCard's price is reasonable.
> To someone comparing it to Real Basic, it's not realistic.
Calling Metacard's price unrealistic is an understatement.
Again, lets be realistic: "power" programmers have a bias against
user-friendly tools like Metacard and other XTalks. They're going to use
C++ or similar anyway. Which means that Metacard basically has to aim
for the less macho programming market. Which puts it squarely in the
niche held by VB.
US$1000 is a significant price for small companies and individual
programmers, and totally impossible for non-professionals such as
myself. Especially when you allow for the exchange rate, Metacard would
cost me close to $2000 in Australian currency. There is no way I could
justify that. A couple of hundred dollars, maybe. But $2000 is more than
I paid for my computer. And it is a *good* computer.
> Real Basic comes in two flavors... Standard ($149.95) and Pro
> ($349.95.) The Standard package is way way way less than MetaCard.
Even the Pro version is less than half the cost of Metacard.
> To a hobbyist, the cost difference is just too much. If MetaCard
> were available at these two price points, I think it'd do a heck
> of a lot better.
Survival = volume. Its as simple as that. It doesn't matter how good
your product is, you can only afford to put the price up so much before
people won't buy it at all. You must find a price level that enables you
to sell enough copies to survive, and you must be competing in the right
marketplace.
Metacard's problem is that, in the price bracket it is marketed at, it
is supremely unfashionable. Director has captured the "artistic" market,
and heavy-duty conventional programming tools based on C++ have the
"techhead" market.
In other words, there is a severe discrepancy between Metacard's target
pricing and the audience that actually appreciates it.
That's not to belittle any of the people who have paid the full price
for Metacard. Quite the opposite. But they are a tiny minority.
An internet search using Google found 2,918 hits for Metacard. But a
search for "Visual Basic" came up with 47,400 hits. Even RealBasic, a
Mac-only product, has 23,000 hits.
It is no coincidence that VB starts with a $100 "learning" version,
going all the way up to $1299, with generous upgrade paths, especially
from competitors products.
--
Steven D'Aprano
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