From: bruce@blilly.UUCP (Bruce Lilly)
Subject: Re: whining about "marketing" (was Re: Does every ...)
Organization: Bruce Lilly
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 92 00:59:13 GMT

In article <id.YNHO.BKE@ferranti.com>, peter@ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) wrote:
> 
> OK, so explain this. MacWorld, PC Magazine, Amiga World, The Programmer's Shop.
> Same product, basically: word processors...
> 
> 	Amiga World, from $18 to $159 (for Word Perfect).
> 	MacWorld, from $56 to $300 (for Microsoft Word).
> 	PC Magazine, $37 to $309 (for Lotus Manuscript).
> 	I could only find one product for UNIX. Microsoft Word
> 		for SCO. $1395. No price on Word Perfect
> 		for UNIX, but I'll bet it's over $300.
> 
> Even in the smallest market there... the Amiga... you have products that
> are better than any UNIX applications (though I readily admit the DOS and
> Mac apps are better still in this area). This just doesn't jibe with your
> claim that there is already a multi-billion dollar market for the sort of
> application software that will attract DOS users.

One possible explanation for the MESS-Word pricing for UNIX vs. for MESS-DOS;
if MS party line is that application software for UNIX is expensive,
it's not so surprising that MS overprices their products for UNIX--
it's a self-fulfilling prophesy.

On the other hand, look at prices for commercially supported versions of
Documentor's Workbench (DWB). I don't have the price sheet in front of
me, but according to my recollection, the price for Elan's Eroff for
IBM Pee Seas is about the same as for the AT&T 3B1 UNIX PC (though for
no apparent reason, prices for other UNIX boxes, e.g. Sun's, are higher;
there's a tremendous variation which probably has little to do with quantity
sold as there were only about 20,000 3B1's and PC7300's built, and I suspect
that very few owners have purchased Eroff).

Slightly off on a tangent, I'd not buy MESS-Word et. al. for a UNIX box;
I'm far more productive using vi and DWB on a clunky old 3B1 (M68010 w/o
coprocessor) than colleages who use MESS-Word on IBM PS/2 model 80's
with math coprocessors (i.e. it's not a hardware issue).

In article <id.1RIO.VY1@ferranti.com>, Peter wrote:
> 
> The point at hand is that there isn't enough of a market for end-user
> applications on UNIX systems for any sort of economies of scale to kick in.
> This is due to a number of things. What I'm trying to address is how these
> problems can be resolved.

(Now perhaps you can see why I went off on a tangent)
There's probably little market for programs designed for non-computer-literate
users for UNIX systems; those folks don't (in general) know any better;
they use whatever PC Week/their friends/their corporate MIS department says
they should use, and most UNIX users want something a bit more capable
than the mass-market Pee Sea programs.

Many UNIX boxes come with end-user application software, or there is
sufficient freely available end-user application software that high-priced
commercial programs are priced out of the market. Virtually all UNIX boxes
come bundled with software for handling email, some come with text processing
software bundled (for others, TeX, and/or groff are available), and the PD
spreadsheet program "SC" works just fine (so why would I *want* to buy 1-2-3
for UNIX???).

> [...] but it's priced out of any reasonable individual's budget
> when they're looking for the equivalent of Word Perfect or Mac Write. The
> nearest UNIX tools for this market are nroff and troff, and even they are
> being priced out of it.

Speaking specifically about the Eroff packeage mentioned above, it's in
the same price range (hundreds of dollars, not tens or thousands).
(A version of nroff came with the development set for the 3B1, and of course,
groff is essentially free.)
IMHO, DWB is far more powerful than the "word processing" programs; using
grap, pic, etc. I can produce documents that Pee Sea users require CAD programs
or "busyness graphics" programs in addition to their "word processors"
in order to produce. If one considers the total cost, the UNIX packages
seem to be quite a bargain.

> The price is a measure of the market. The price is high because there
> isn't enough demand for economies of scale to kick in. The marginal cost
> per sale for these products is negligable, so the price is very strongly
> determined by anticipated market... which is tiny.

I'm certain there are other factors (e.g. how much the vendor believes
the market will bear).  I can't believe that Elan sold such quantities of
Eroff for the 3B1 so as to make it half the price of Eroff for Suns.

> There is virtually no market for end-user applications on UNIX.

I'd qualify that statement somewhat:
There is virtually no market for simple-minded end-user applications on UNIX.

>  As long as
> this remains true, there will be no significant number of end-user applications
> on UNIX, and nobody will consider UNIX for end-user systems.

There are plenty of end-user applications available for UNIX systems.
I've already mentioned several of the "office productivity" types. For
examples of others, look at a catalog of third party software published
by any of the major UNIX hardware vendors.  Another good source is any
comp.sources.unix archive site (and compiling and installing most of these
source code programs is not much more complicated than installing a
shrink-wrapped, binary-only Pee Sea program).

While I agree that there's a chicken-and-egg situation regarding
commercial UNIX applications and the market for those applications,
my perspective is that there hasn't been a "killer application", i.e.
one that has an irresistible price/performance ratio, and so the ho-hum
commercial applications that are available (and usually at inflated prices)
haven't sold well.  With all of the publicly available source coded
applications for UNIX systems, it would be no small feat to develop
such a "killer application" that isn't a me-too version of a PD
program (in fact, had groff been available 4 years ago, I probably
wouldn't have purchased the Eroff package).

-- 
	Bruce Lilly		blilly!bruce@Broadcast.Sony.COM
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Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc