Richard Gaskin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> responded to
Judy Perry's plaint
> Judy Perry writes:
>
> > But cost is still an issue. Everyone's been asked to
'see' that the
> > company cannot afford to offer the product for less.
What others wish
> > not to see is that many users cannot justify a $900
replacement for a
> > $100 tool.
>
> But HyperCard was not a $100 tool.
>
> Market succeesses like Flash suggest that HC was worth at
least three times
> what it was selling for.
>
> Apple heavily subsidized HyperCard, selling it so far
below market value as
> a tradeoff for what they saw as a strategic benefit for
the OS/hardware
> platform. At one time they were committed enough to
subsidize it 100%,
> giving it away for free with every Mac. I still believe
there's a good
> argument for them to consider similar moves, but
apparently they "think
> different" on this.
>
> Remember that once Apple decided that the product needed
to be viable on its
> own revenue stream, $100 was not enough to sustain the
unusually high
> overhead associated with authoring tools relative to other
application
> types. Today HyperCard is no longer in active
development.
>
Richard, I agree with you that HyperCard was not a $100
tool -- but here are some slightly different reasons.
It was widely acknowledged that HC by itself did not have
the functionality to do everything that was needed. How many
people purchased CompileIt to improve functionality? Or had
to purchase (or pirate) externals to do what they needed it
to do? Color was a need that Apple finally partially
addressed with an external. And it charged for the upgrade
at that point. Need more field space? An external had to be
purchased to do the job.
In other words, to get real functionality out of Hypercard
you had to add on to it several layers of external
functionality, some of them costing as much as Hypercard did
itself! If you added the functionality and did not pay for
it, well .... It is no wonder that people stopped developing
for HC, seeing as they did not get paid for their hard work.
So there were several people out there who perhaps had $300
to $400 "versions" of Hypercard, whether they actually paid
that much for it or not.
And I really liked your look at other major tools.
> When we look at other offerings in the same feature
category as RunRev, we
> see a favorable comparison:
>
> Director $999 - single platform
> Director $1800 - dual platform
> ToolBook $2495 - single platform
>
> What some of the folks on this list seem to be looking for
is a product in a
> different category. I respect that, and hope that the
good folks at Rev
> will be able to define a product that fully satisfies that
category.
>
> Thus far their focus has been on providing 100% of the
features for a
> fraction of the cost, with the trade-off being the
requirement for getting
> support via email on this list as opposed to via email to
them directly.
>
(snip)
>
> Macromedia's educational price for their $399 Flash
product is $99, with the
> restriction that no commercial development can be done
with it (they warn on
> their site that they do periodic audits).
>
> I agree that it would be useful for RunRev to consider
offering a volume
> discount for the education market in line with the
percentages offered by
> market leaders.
>
Cheers!
Raymond
