Dan Shafer wrote:
I reiterate what I said earlier today in this very interesting discussion. I do not believe Rev has any serious chance of making significant inroads into the professional development community on ANY platform, and certainly not on Windows or (moreso?) on *nix. It will always be a product aimed at hobbyist and inventive user class developers who do not write code for a living but who have real problems to solve at work or at home.
Depends on what you mean by 'significant inroads.' If it means making enough to provide a return to shareholders and keep the product alive and well, then I beg to disagree. If it means competing head to head with MS products then I agree. As you rightly pointed out earlier, even Borland can't compete w/ MS, but does that make them unsuccessful?
If Borland is a joke, with a sustained customer base at least an order of magnitude larger than Rev's it would make Rev the punchline.
I prefer not to see it so dimly.
There is evidently room for many players in the dev tools arena, on all platforms. The computing revolution has barely begun, and everything is still in flux: Windows marketshare is in decline, Linux is the fastest-growing OS, Mac OS is holding steady and there's always the chance Apple may one day take an interest in increasing marketshare.
The good thing is that it seems RunRev is hearing all sides of this debate, and handling them all positively:
Historically there has indeed been a Mac-centricity to the product because, as has been noted, that's where the low-hanging fruit was.
In v2.2 XP native appearances took the product a huge leap forward for that OS, and in v2.5 it seems they're doing the same for Linux.
While it may remain debatable whether a small business can adequately penetrate two very different markets simultaneously, to their credit RunRev has rebranded the hobbyist product to more clearly distinguish it from the current award-winning professional dev tool.
There may be an argument for spinning the pro tools out into a separate business unit to avoid dillution of resources, putting day-to-day management of the pro product line in the hands of those who remain excited by the potential there. But that may not be necessary so long as the product managers for each are given reasonable budgets and sufficient autonomy to respond to the radically different challenges each market requires.
So from where I sit, yes, there are many details to be decided, and of course the proof will be in the pudding: all the talk here about what's best will either be validated or invalidated when we see where the numbers fall this time next year.
But overall, the general plan seems to be a reasonably healthy attempt to capture both ends of the market, and it is appears there is some effort toward providing a thoughtful balance of resources to address the needs of developers using each OS proportionate to sales.
One thing I know about Kevin is that he's a bit of an info-junkie: if he sees a tilt in interest from users of non-Mac OSes I feel confident he'll push those platform-specific enhancements even more quickly than the current good clip. While MetaCard was born on UNIX, in v2.5 it finally looks pretty there. I'm sure there's more to come....
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___________________________________________________ Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
