Hi folks,
I've been reading with interest the ongoing discussion of Rev's pricing
model. It started as a discussion about lack of clarity in the pricing
model, and has now become a discussion of what the pricing model should
be. As long as we're being theoretical here, I feel well qualified to
comment. ;-)
The comparison with HyperCard is not apt. Apple at first gave it away,
presumably as a way to add value to the Mac experience, and certainly
because all PCs at the time included a copy of Basic. Whatever the
reason, it was 'sold' as part of the Mac. Later HC had an independant
price attached to it, a price which has always seemed unreasonably low
for such a powerful tool. And we know where that led - to the demise of
the product.
SuperCard has always been priced fairly, with various deals over the
years giving lots of people access to it. And since it's available from a
company other than Apple, a comparison here would be more useful. Alas,
they never manageed the cross platform trick.
Perhaps one reason why Rev's pricing seems so discomfiting is that Rev is
really 2 things: it's a programming language and it's a programming tool,
and the tool's price is expected to carry the cost of language
development. I'm tempted to compare Rev to CodeWarrior, with its $500 Pro
version and its $50 Learning version, but that's not fair because CW is a
tool, not a language. Which leads me to think that maybe the only way Rev
and similar x-talk tools will ever become priced the way we'd all like is
for the x-talk part of it to be taken over by a standards organization of
some sort, kind of like C++ is handled. Then Rev could compete on value
and price with other tools, all of which use the standard x-talk language.
And now that I've upset almost everyone, I'll consider my good deed done
for the day and retire from the field of battle.
Rob
P.S.
I should state my personal bias here. I don't get paid for prgramming -
so $350 is not happenin' for me. And $995 is in another galaxy. I've
downloaded the free trial version, but I don't think I can even make new
versions of the many tools I created in HyperCard, because I trained
myself to program in 2 main places - the background script and the stack
script. All other objects had very short scripts which simply passed the
action on to those main scripts. I'd hate to start to make spagetti code,
after all that effort learning to do it 'right'.
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Rob Stevenson - MSCS
Mus.Soft Computer Services
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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