>Am I resistant to paying professional prices for professional tools? As
>an artist, not a programmer, no. I have $200 watercolour brushes. I pay
>$25.00 for a 5 ml tube of watercolour. I bought my copy of HyperCard 2.2
>for close to $200 Canadian. I buy regular copies of FreeHand. I pay
>Canadian dollars. Presently MetaCard would be over 1600 dollars Canadian.
I haven't thought of this. I'm also Canadian, and I paid $450 for my
first copy of Hypercard - you got a deal! For you Americano's out
there $999 US x 1.6 (current exchange rate without tax and import
duty fee's applied) is $1598.40 Canadian. That's a new G4 in the US
(still cost $2500+ up here).
But that's not Scott's problem. I just tag it to the cost of the
project and nail my clients for it. I nail them for everything from
paper, transportation, food, everything. I charge them for my time
then I add a supply fee, an extra cost or *tax* for equipment
*rental* etc. How else would I be able to afford my cool stuff? By
the end of the year, I have collected enough money from them to buy
new equipment (with the sale of the old).
>MetaCard is simply out of range and too, uhm, difficult, for some who
>aren't professional programmers or developers.
Because that would put a small operation out of business. If Scott
had a client base of 5000 users each paying $99 for MC then that
would get him and his staff a whooping $495,000. Now do that math,
subtract 30% for taxes, then office rental, salaries (say 4 people at
80g's each), staff lunches, parties, whatever. Half a million is not
worth the paper it's printed on. Then, most $99 dollar titles don't
have yearly upgrades, and if they do it's $20 or less. That's year
one, now he has to sell another 5000 copies to keep his staff
employed.
MC is not Freehand. They likely have 5% of Freehand's user base. 3D
Studio MAX has 120,000 seats (it's a public figure and I contract for
them). That's considered a cornered market by Autodesk standards.
They charge $5000 per title sold, but imagine the support team
required to maintain that user base!?! Insane. And Apple's
HyperCard, well they made their money. I paid full price, $450. Now
they just crank out $99 boxes because there is no support, no
development, and I doubt there are 3 manuals totaling 1200 pages
still come with it like it did for my copy. It's just easy greenbacks
for Apple, so what's the harm in selling it?
I think the only reason Scott's still around after 10 years is
because he's a smart man that knows he can't live on a $99 title and
hope to feed his family (how many retired shareware authors do we
know).
>Why shouldn't a 'hobbyist' or just plain Mac user have a reasonable,
>inexpensive, and accessible programming environment?
Apple has a much smaller user base than Windows. The profits on a
$99 title on the Mac vs the PC are staggering, which is why there are
very few in relation to the PC. As a plain Mac user, you should
already be aware that *money* and *reasonable* are rarely spoken
words for our platform. The only thing keeping the Mac around
nowadays is Shareware - and Mac OS X is the only killer app to appear
on scene in the last 10 years. MS Windows is now officially the only
operating system on the market *not* based on a full UNIX
architecture.
I'm not pooping on your head Doug, I got carried away again. It's
just that sometimes we forget it takes money to stay in business.
I only hope Scott actually sells 5000 copies a year.
> > http://home.golden.net/~samu <
>> There is a crack in everything, thats how the light gets in <
>
>
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--
Cheers,
Simon
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--------------------------------------------------
"The great discoveries in science are not punctuated by 'Eureka! I've
found it!' but rather "Hmmm,that's funny...." Isaac Asimov
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