From: johnm@cory.Berkeley.EDU (John D. Mitchell)
Subject: Re: GeoWorks' future (was Re: An SDK in 1993, did he say?)
Organization: University of California, at Berkeley
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 22:00:58 GMT

Okay, I'll take a quick stab at this whole discussion...

Release Timing:
--------------

As Doug has pointed out, there is *no* silver bullet.  GeoWorks is
committed to quality.  Everyone complains about the products being 'late'.
The fact is, to implement all of the crucial "must have" features that the
users have said they want takes time.  Anybody can throw together something
that kinda, sorta implements a feature, but to do it right (i.e. make it
powerful and easy to use and fast and defect free) takes a good bit more
work.  :-)  I'd bet that those people who clamor the loudest for the
product to be released prematurely are the same ones who would complain the
loudest about the bugs and missing features of that release.  :-)

Throwing money/people at the 'problem':
--------------------------------------

This just doesn't work.  Expertise, knowledge, experience and the rest all
take time.  Time where the aspiring engineer must learn many things.  Some
things by looking at other programs.  Some by reading the documentation.
Some by trial and error.  And some by asking lots of questions of those who
already know the stuff.  That all takes time.  Most of it comes from the
novice him or herself.  But it also takes a good deal of time from the rest
of the staff to answer all of those questions.

SDK:
---

GeoWorks has talked with a lot of developers (of all sorts) and the *nearly
unanimous* response has been to create a PC-based SDK (i.e. no Unix based
version).

Also, beta testing a SDK is very different from an end user product.  There
is a very long cycle time because how do you test a development system?  By
developing, of course.  :-)  That takes time too.  :-)  The good thing
about the beta is that many of those developers will have a product ready
(or close to ready) to ship when the commercial product is released (i.e.
it won't be a year after the retail product before 'real' applications are
released :-).

Two machine development:
-----------------------

I had thought that this had been put to rest by all of the previous
discussions about the SDK...  Sigh.

The second machine *is only necessary if the developer plans on using the
Swat debugger*.  As Doug pointed out, the debugger was originally designed
and implemented as a remote debugger that has a small stub that runs on the
target machine and the main program running on the development machine
(originally a workstation).  It will take much less time to port the
debugger to a dual PC machine environment.  Also as Doug said, hey, this is
the *first* version.  I think y'all are going to be blown away by the
incredible power of the system (especially if you realize that this is the
first release).

Marketing:
---------

It's awful hard to make all that much of a dent in the Windows marketing
juggernaut.  They spent some 30 million marketing bucks for the 3.1
upgrade.  But remember that WordPerfect made itself the dominant word
processor through word of mouth.

Pricing:
-------

Sigh.  I thought this had been laid to rest too.

At all levels (retail, street, and upgrades) I think that GeoWorks is a
wonderful deal.


Oh well, I can't recall any other points so I guess that's it for now.

Hope this helps,
	John D. Mitchell
	johnm@cory.Berkeley.EDU

P.S.	I speak solely for my (personal) self.  GeoWorks speaks for itself.