On Apr 6, 2006, at 6:36 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Lynn Fredericks has said that inventive users like me don't really
exist, which does not inspire confidence.
The reaction to Lynn's post has been curious. I read the same
post, but I got a very different message.
It didn't seem to me that he was claiming that people don't exist,
but merely that inventing a phrase to describe them which
ultimately turns out to be roughly synonymous with "everyone who
uses Rev" may not be as useful for strategic planning as existing
language other successful companies use to describe market segments
and personas.
Fair enough. But it struck me that failure to properly identify a
subset of users when trying to decide how to properly cater to this
subset from a business standpoint is functionally equivalent to
declaring them nonexistent. In other words, "We can't define this
market, so we'll spend our time on the market we CAN identify". That
was the meaning I received.
What if IBM had said, "We can't really define potential PC users,
because they could be anybody, and use them for anything, so let's
just continue to build mainframes"? What IBM did was build a
machine, and adapted it later as the users adopted it. When they saw
that their sluggish bureaucratic structure couldn't adapt quickly
enough to the market, it got out of the PC business.
What I'm saying is that maybe Rev should aim their strategy toward
adaptability and away from tight market focus.
Lynn's post made it sound like they were going for tight market
focus. And if this is true, then they can't help but go the way of
Big Blue in the software marketplace and place the primary focus on
the enterprise.
This is not to say there isn't big money to be made servicing the
enterprise market. But where does that leave me? And if I can't get
the warm feeling that future upgrades won't be much less than full
enterprise pricing, then I'm not sure I want to commit to this
development platform.
I may find out that Rev Media will do what I want. There has to be a
way to turn off that background, though, because I need to have my
app on the screen with my word processor. I don't mind running in
the player. But if it's going to cost three hundred bucks to turn
that backdrop off, then I have to look for something else.
Steve
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