Lynn Fredricks wrote:
I must say that Revolution is in no way crippled and that
having such limits does make some sense. Without it, nothing
stops you from creating a standalone with all the features of
Revolution IDE including standalone generation. If it was not
for the scriptlimits, every single user could fork and create
their own development product and this is probably something
that would hurt runrev business.
I believe this was essentially the story behind Digital Chisel, which did
that with SuperCard.
Yep. A story with many lessons:
Digital Chisel was a product which put a new UI on the SuperCard engine
and sold it in direct competition to SC.
It's an interesting side note that after SC won Macworld Magazine's
annual award for "Best Product of the Year" in 1996, the following year
DC won the same title, effectively making SC the only product to win
that award two years in a row. :)
At the time, SC was owned by Allegiant Technologies, who stopped losing
sales to DC by negotiating a special agreement with them which was
reportedly to their mutual satisfaction and allowed both companies to
continue with their respective growth plans.
Allegiant's strategy, and in turn DC's, hinged on a Windows deployment
option, and when Allegiant couldn't complete the Windows product the
shut company down (SC has since been acquired by Mark Lucas and Scott
Simon of Solutions Etc., with uber-Mac-programmer Lucas as the lead
engineer).
Digital Chisel then pursued their Windows strategy by attempting to port
their product to Java.
DC was apparently unprepared for the orders-of-magnitude greater cost of
developing with Java, and not long after they shut their doors.
I get at least two lessons from this story:
1. It's useful for a vendor of a powerful and flexible engine to protect
themselves from customers who might compete directly with them at a very
tiny fraction of the vendor's development cost.
2. Switching from Xtalk to Java is a really expensive thing to do.
:)
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
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