Re: TTG marketing woes

["Charles Creesy" creesy@xxxxxxxx]

Hey, Paul, is Microsoft paying you to hang around here and post
commercials for Word or what?

I followed your instructions, and despite the seemingly inescapable Windows
shimmer, I was impressed. I must say this program has come a long way
since the last time I looked closely at it, I guess two years ago now,
when some of our people had to move to Windows and we evaluated the
alternatives. At that time, incidentally, we opted for AmiPro over Word,
for reasons that are evidently obsolete now.

(An aside: when Word can make its screen look so good, why does it come
with the defaults set to such an awful configuration? I've made my
complaint to a lot of Word users, and Paul, you are the first who was able
to tell me what to do about it. I guess these programs get too big for
most folks to understand.)

So you have made the case that one can write with Word without having to
touch the mouse, adjust the screen to get a comfortable draft mode, and set
up macros to handle repetitive stuff. I gather there is still some
argument about the relative merits of Word's programming capability vs.
XyWrite's XPL--or does one simply toss the ball to Visual Basic when one
has to do more than Word's macro language can handle?

Word's downside is that it is slower--no problem if you have a fast
Pentium--and that it demands a lot of disk space, which gets cheaper by
the day. That's all?

So what hope is there for XyWrite, up against Microsoft's muscle, not only
in marketing but in the resources Gates can throw at development? Instead
of putting its eggs in Win 95 (playing to Microsoft's strength), it would
seem TTG should be going after niches. I like the suggestion that it try
to make XyWrite THE text editor for Linux: I've yet to see anything in the
Unix world that comes close to XyWrite, you would think there's an
opportunity there. Is it too late to try to add more functionality to
make XyWrite clearly preferable as the text-preparation tool for
publishing applications (as it is now for many of us who have built up
libraries of XPL routines, but not as it comes out of the box)?

Or to put it another way, tell us again Paul just why you are still hanging
around here?

--Chuck Creesy
Princeton University Press
creesy@xxxxxxxx
609-258-5745  Fax: 609-258-6305