paul while i shall not go into whether jfw for n t is worth the price or not,
i do want to dispell this myth that n t sales are few and far between.
actually i recommend jfw because if the end user does for some reason have to
move into n t it is already reading and working in that enviroment.
still blind people act like the market is so small, while the market is a
small one it is also one where everybody in the market has to have it to do
everyday things that others take for granted.
do you think that telesensory up and sold off their totally blind stuff for no
reason?
more than likely the reason telesensory sold off their blind stuff is because
they lost the very profitable goverment contract to hj.
probley that contract was their best money maker in the totally blind market.
the reason they lost out is that they had no n t screen reader.
hj has the social security contract and my guess is that sells big bucks.
another thing here is that sooner or later everybody in win 95 is going to be
using win n t down the road.
so i am pretty certain that hj is not loseing anything on their n t line.
hj is smart enough to know that the over 20,000 users of their win 95 product
will eventually be forced into buying the n t product.
by the way when i say hj has sold 24,000 copies i am baseing that on the
serial number of the screen readers they are selling now.
now i have no way of knowing if that number is all win 95 sales or not, do
know that in my case i own both jfw for 95 and n t, and when i got the n t
version i kept the same serial number.
also not sure how hj does their site liscenses, its possible that a site
liscense does have only one serial number which would mean that their total
sales far exceed 24,000 copies.
of course that is an assumption on my part.
a little math should make it pretty clear that hj is grossing a lot of money.
when win n t 5 hits the market i suspect the majority of blind users will
switch to the n t version because it is far more stable, which means that all
this weird stuff people read about on these list will be fewer plus n t should
also offer people doing scanning more speed.
the main reason people are not using n t 4 is that it lacks plug and play.
with other screen readers having total sales in the 5,000 range and still
staying in the market, i would suspect that hj is not loseing any money on the
n t product at this time.
also suspect that what many describe as incrimental sales is probley
approaching what other screen readers have sold in win 95.
bill cameron
At 08:22 AM 1/20/99 -0700, you wrote:
>>There is a difference between JFW windows for 95 and NT. JFW uses a
>>different method of accessing the video display under NT than what is
>>used with windows 95. There is a jfwvid.dll file that is installed
>>into your nt system directory which does not exist under windows 95.
>
>Precisely. The entire device driver model is different between 95/98 and NT.
>I have coworkers who have ported Windows95 device drivers to NT and I can
>testify that it is a substantial development effort. For JFW specifically,
>many would agree the incremental sales from NT are probably small. For these
>reasons I feel the extra cost of the NT product is justified.
>
> -Paul Martz
> Hewlett Packard Workstation Systems Lab
>
>-
>Visit the jfw ml web page: http://yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au/~nallan/jfw
-
Visit the jfw ml web page: http://yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au/~nallan/jfw
