Re: TTG marketing woes

[Harmon F Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx]

>computer-savvy scholars who are delighted with Win95, who use Word, and who
>do not want to spend their days trying to figure out what a "protection
>fault" is. Those of us who prefer to expend our mental energies getting

  I certainly wasn't suggesting a return to win3 -- I don't get any GPF
problems on my computers.

>smart about something other than our computers would not consider the
>advent of the mouse, of GUI, or other shortcuts to be part of a
>"dumbing-down" process (one could just as easily say that moving from the

  Whoa! You clearly misread my message -- I'm all in favor of GUIs, just as
long as I also have access to the command line -- in or out of the
applications. I currently run three different GUIs, as a matter of fact --
well, four, actually, because I sometimes have to resort to windoz. I prefer
Xwindows under Linux, second choice is Warp, and third is Geos (actually I
like the Geos GUI better than Warps, but it doesn't have many apps). The
point I was making is that Win95 is part of the dumbing down, because it is
"down" -- at the very bottom of the OS heap -- and everything else is up
from there. And the difference is rather stark, especially when you get into
the upper levels like Linux and Solaris. But even Geos, when you consider
how extremely tiny it is, and how little resources it needs to run on (8088
and 512K), is just head and shoulders above windoz or win95 -- too bad it
hasn't the application development.

>In the case of XW, TTG has ignored its market, as Robert Bidinotto has so
>accurately described it. I started with XYIII+ because the documentary

  Exactly -- I just don't think they every really understood what their
market niche was with XY, and they want to make it a mainstream product,
instead of selling to the hod rod and hacker types, who really appreciate
the amazing speed and customizability.
  Right now, the rapidly expanding Linux community is crying for a really
hot WYSIWYG editor. XY -- even the DOS version -- is a natural. And, in
fact, XY3 was already ported to Unix in 1991 by Hunter. If TTG would track
that down and do the minor changes to make it a native Linux app, they'd
probably sell more than they could possibly sell to the windoz market. Word
Perfect 6 has been ported to Linux, as a commercial product, and Linux users
are not terribly enthused, but it's all there is right now. What they want
is XY, they just don't know about it -- and TTG, for some reason, simply
doesn't have the time and/or energy to try to reach them.
  It was said not too long ago here by someone who knows that TTG has other
problems with other holdings not related to XY which is eating up a big
chunk of their time, so maybe we should just cut them some slack and hope
they can get it together.

>again? Is it a sign of "dumbness" to ask a word processor to create a
>table or insert a footer without having to figure out such arcania as GU,
>PL nom, BT, BO? (One of the conference proceedings I was submitting to

  No, but OTOH, the ability to play around with XPL is one of XY's major
strong points, and exactly what many of it's users find so compelling. And
what Linux users would go crazy over -- although they'd probably be
demanding a switch to Perl or Javascript. And only rightly so.
  But really, with Linux becoming more and more popular in the business
community, and win95 sales falling off, plus being rather soundly rejected
by government, financial, and corporate entities, TTG could probably double
their market share with a Linux port -- and the work was already done.

>Is it a sign of "dumbness" to ask a Windows program to drag and drop its
>files into print manager and actually have them print out? XW won't do it.

  Maybe you should try Warp. 8-) Sorry, I just couldn't resist that.


--
Harmon Seaver
hseaver@xxxxxxxx

hoka hey!

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Copyright, Harmon F. Seaver, 1995. License to distribute this post is
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