I've seen several posts regarding the licensing costs for Revolution
being prohibitive for casual users and I have a simple solution.
1. Keep the existing models
A. The free downloadable version will give users a good taste for
the product with limits*
B. The standard and professional versions are priced pretty cheap
if you are going to sell something but expensive for the hobbyist.
2. Add a "Personal" version priced between $50 and $100 which is exactly
like the standard version except you cannot make any standalone builds
(or alternatively standalone builds only for a specific platform). This
would be great for the casual user and hobbyist because they can write
all the full featured programs they want for themselves at a reasonable
price and have a simple upgrade path if they want to make cross-platform
standalone applications.
I think you would be able to sell many copies of the personal version
and would likely lead to many upgrades to standard or professional
versions as users gain experience.
I also see this as an opportunity to perhaps license computers
manufacturers such as Apple, HP/Compaq, Dell, Gateway, etc to
license/bundle the personal version with computers they sell. The
bundled version would be an alternative to Visual Basic on Windows and a
replacement for HyperCard on the Mac and would only support application
writing for that platform with an upgrade option for all platforms.
This seems like a win-win-win solution. Let me know what you think.
Bill Vlahos
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*One of the first things I tried with the free version was importing a
few HyperCard stacks. None of the ones I tried worked as I immediately
encountered script errors and, in fact, one of them even crashed
Revolution. I now suspect that the script errors were due to the 10 line
limitation which I must have missed in the download process.
