Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm,comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: uAccess 1.62
From: scasterg@waltham.columbus.oh.us
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 04:40:12 -0500
X-Mailer: rnMac Buggy, I mean Beta, Test Version

> 
> (I was interested in the product; now I'm not.  If I'm going to spend $400
> for UUCP, I'll save up a little more, and get MachTen or A/UX, and do real
> UUCP, with real news/mail, etc....)
> 
> Bob

Yeah, you listening Intercon? uAcces (or whataever it's called now) is just so 
ungodly overpriced you drive away most of your market.

Think about the market for a minute here.

You've got people using Macs who want uucp mail and news. What sort of people 
are these likely to be?

Businesses? Probably not. A business considering a uucp connection will probably 
have a systems administrator of some sort who realizes that he can do better, 
dollar for dollar and function for function with a dos or unix box, and won't 
want to spend $300 for a Mac application that is not even a particularly fine 
implementation.

Individuals who can afford to spend $400 on a software package? No. these 
individuals probably have a day job as the sysadmin for the above company. 
they're not going to pay $400 for uucp! They'll put the $400 toward getting 
themselves an 80x86 box and run unix or dos waffle on it.

The kind of people who are doing uucp on a Mac are individual enthusiasts who 
tend not to be rich. they have one computer and that's all they can afford. Of 
course they can't afford to spend $300 on a uucp package. Those folks are 
currently getting by with email only and waiting for ToadNews to be released, or 
they really dug deep and put off that new setof tires on the toyota to be able 
to afford uAccess.

The demographic group of people who have the money and insist on doing it on  
Mac is *very* small.

Furthermore, when ToadNews is finally released, you'll see your customer base 
take a massive nosedive. For $50-$75 bucks I can do virtually everything uAccess 
can do:

uupc 3.0  Free
ToadNews  $25(?)
rnMac     $25
Eudora    Free \_either Fernmail or Eudora, don't need both
Fernmail  $25  /

This is a perfectly functional setup for probaby 90% of the users. It's only 
drawbacks are that it is primarily a leaf node -- won't do a good job of feeding 
other sites -- and won't smoothly provide news&mail access to clients on an 
appletalk network, although you can work around that via filesharing, if 
security isn't a major factor. All you need is copies of rnMac and eudora or 
Fernmail on each of the client machines set up to look at a mounted appleshare 
volume.

In fact, there are some advantages to the above setup that uAccess doesn't have, 
primarily due to its modularity. Last I heard, all of uAccess's functionality 
was incorporated into one monolithic application. Stupid. I save a lot of RAM by 
only having to have uupc running all the time (and usually my unbatcher, though 
you wouldn't have to), not my mail and newsreaders and a built-in comm program 
as well! I can also take advantage of improvements in one product without having 
to change it all. If a better newsreader than rnMac comes along, I can swap it 
in. If I decide to switch from Fernmail to Eudora, no problem. If uuMac ever 
becomes a reality and it turns out to be better than uupc, then I can use it. 
I'm not locked into this one company's vision of the way things should work.

People who really need to be able to feed other sites probably are ambitious 
enough that they're going to want more than uAccess can offer anyway, they're 
going to want to get into real unix uucp -- I'd consider $400 a good down 
payment toward A/UX or a x86 with some flavor of unix and it will outright buy 
you MachTen for the Mac I think, and you get a lot more for your money than just 
uucp mail and news.

The only way uAccess can survive as a product is to cut it's price at least in 
half. For abuot $150 (twice the cost of the freeware/shareware combos) a lot of 
people will be willing to buy commercially supported uucp mail and news 
software. Above that, and it just stops being worth the investment.

Please, get smart, Intercon.