Thanks for this debate, Dan and Chipp,
Best Regards, Pierre
Le 7 août 04, à 19:19, Dan Shafer a écrit :
Chipp.........
You knew I'd have to chime in here. :-)
Not simply to be contrarian, but I do not believe RR has any serious chance of making real inroads into other platforms. Period. No matter what they do. Over the decades -- yes, decades! -- I've been in this business, I bet I've seen 100 or more development platforms, languages, and tools emerge that would have made Windows programmers more productive and efficient. Not one of them thrived. Only a few survived.
Now you could go through the list and find something wrong with every one of them, I'm sure. A reason they failed. But I submit that if in all that time, no new language or tool that wasn't backed by a huge company (Microsoft in particular but also Sun and IBM and, for a while at least, Borland) ever made real inroads. My belief -- and I confess that it is only a belief, not something I can support with anything stronger than my own experiences an insights -- is that Windows developers are principally if not exclusively interested in developing for the Windows platform and that the Bandwagon Effect results in the vast majority of them using mainstream tools. Hell, Java doesn't even have significant presence among pure Windows developers; it's been shifted to the enterprise/server side of the equation and Microsoft is on the verge of dislodging even that penetration.
Oh, sure, there is a minuscule number of programmers who experience a Smalltalk or a Revolution or an Objective C and say, "Wow, I can be way more productive than my competitors with this. I think I'll use it instead of C++ or C#." And some of them stick with their out-of-the-mainstream tools. But most don't. Eventually, the fact that 95% of their colleagues are using other tools with widespread library support, fellow programmers to exchange code and ideas with, and all the other components of the Bandwagon Effect drag most of them back to the mainstream tools.
This is true even on the Mac. Only a minority of desktop app developers who develop for the Mac are ultimately interested in selling Windows products. (I'm not saying this *should* be the case, but it's a reality nonetheless.) CodeWarrior lets hard-core C types deliver cross-platform but they're a bit player on both sides of the fence. Apple's dev tools, esp under OS X, are awesome and powerful. Every single Mac programmer I know uses them and not Revolution despite the fact that they could use Rev and greatly expand their market. In some cases, they are working for an all-Mac customer or client base. In others, they just don't care; they'd rather build apps with all of the coolness and nuance of a Mac app and forego the Windows marketplace than compromise. In effect, this is another face of the same argument you make for why RR needs to make the product less Mac-centric: developers on those "other" platforms want to see tools that feel like those platforms.
At the end of the day, RR has to find niches where cross-platform development is important or even critical. Those niches exist. But they are not mainstream programmers on either platform (and certainly not on *nix, whose developers seem to prefer Open Source tools). To delude itself into thinking it will *ever* make significant inroads into any traditional programming market would, I think, be the end of RR. I think they should focus exclusively on the folks I call Inventive Users who are not full-time professional coders, who can make a tool switch without a huge technical or social cost, and who are at least interested in if not motivated by the possibility of cross-platform development.
As it happens, I think that audience is at least 10 times as large as the professional programming audience and vastly more receptive to new development tools and technologies. But reaching that audience is tricky.
On Aug 6, 2004, at 11:15 PM, Chipp Walters wrote:
I also believe there is too much 'Mac' centric focus in RR. The GUI is completely Mac based, and so is much of the marketing focus. Though, this does represent the 'low-hanging fruit', RR won't ever truly make inroads onto other platforms w/out a concerted marketing effort by the company.
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