Back in the Smalltalk days (man, I gotta stop this reminiscing crap),
I once asked Adele Goldberg at ParcPlace why they sold their version
of the language at such a high price point compared to Digitalk. Her
answer was brilliant and insightful. "Because we don't want a bunch
of garage programmer hobbyists trying to figure out the language and
clogging up our support lines. We make a lot more money from the
serious professionals who spend real money and go to training classes
and learn it."
Hmmmmmmmm.
On Jun 6, 2005, at 3:58 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Dan Shafer wrote:
I had lunch today with a good friend who is a serious Java gear-head.
He says the IDE he uses -- Eclipse (which is open source) -- has
dozens of bugs that require knowledgeable workarounds. "Any
programmer worth his or her salt knows that tiptoeing around
these land mines goes with the territory," he claims.
I think the real problem with Rev is its schizophrenia: it's a
fairly serious developer IDE that tries also to be usable by and
accessible to people with little or no programming training and
experience. Those folks don't have the high level of tolerance
for bugs and quirks that professionals do. They expect things
like the IDE to actually work.
That was one of the reasons Dr. Raney only sold licenses for $995
-- it was a sort of marketing filter that worked well for him on
two sides:
- It meant he sold fewer license, but he didn't have to sell as
many to earn the same money
- His support costs were faaaaaaaaaaaaar below industry averages,
since he was dealing with people who had usually been around the
block with enough other tools to know how to deal with the small
stuff.
I'm not suggesting Rev do the same, just agreeing that selling
something as powerful as Rev cheaply is indeed a double-edged sword.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
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Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Co-Chair
RevConWest '05
June 17-18, 2005, Monterey, California
http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit/RevConWest
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