On Sep 3, 2004, at 8:08 AM, Kirk McElhearn wrote:
On 9/3/04 4:54 PM, "Dan Shafer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Education is the largest market Rev—or HyperCard, etc.—will ever serve
and hope to make large inroads.
I hope not. The company will be out of business if that's the case. As far as I know, there is not one company today making significant money serving the education market with software, let alone programming software.
I can think of one off the top of my head: Inspiration (www.inspiration.com), who makes outlining/mind-mapping software.
Yeah, I know about Inspiration. But they are a VERY small company, much too small to support a full-blown development tool like Rev.
(FWIW, I *love* Inspiration. I've built a few Web sites using it in some clever ways that the owner of the company shared with me.)
I've beenThere are some. The key word in my response is "significant." I don't think there are any such companies who are also big enough to maintain both a development and a support effort for a full-blown development tool.
in touch with PR people who represent other companies that make a living
from software for the education market - they are usually not high-profile
companies, and they usually serve only that market.
Schools typically want software free or at very low cost and they are (speaking from personal experience) very tough support customers because of turnover, lack of time and resources for most teachers and students to really dive in and learn a single program in the context of an academic calendar, and relatively infrequent use of any single piece of software. They are a difficult market to penetrate as well; the decision-maker is very often someone not on the org chart in a place where you could expect them to be. I'm sure things have gotten better since my last foray into that market, but making money there is a real challenge.
Kirk
My latest book: How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther
http://www.mcelhearn.com/htde.html
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. . Kirk McElhearn | Chemin de la Lauze | 05600 Guillestre | France . .
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