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One of the best marketing Histories I know of is the NETSCAPE experience.
they gave it away and let advertising support it. Support came from user
groups, but it worked. The business case followed. It will not need
support from any of the bigeeees and if updates are provided at less than
$9 on CD roms the market will start to grow, not for the software, but for
the expertise to produce products from it.
My experience in house is that 1 month with NG free may not be enough
time to build a use for its capabilities. It takes a lot of people with
some software knowledge to create an installed based to make a product
work and a consentrated need to solve a problem that uses the product to
justify a corporate project.
Have you considered an open source model, where users can use it for
as long as they like as long as they do not market what they develop
without donating to the public domain the technologies they develop.
Put it on ebay at $9 for a disc bundled with as many good applications as
you can bundle. Develop the expertise to use the products instead of
spending the money to sell the product.
Charge for support, hold classes, and make your money that way. People
who do projects will pay for support. Others might pay something but they
want to learn on their own. Suppose you develop an interactive disc which
not only shows how to use the product but also how to integrate it with
out xml and sell that for $40 or so.
Without an installed based of qualified users no large demand for the
product will emerge. or You could market it in traditional fashion, spend
millions in advertising and create the installed based.
sterling
On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Michael Champion wrote:
> Jirka Kosek wrote:
> >
> > Everyone who works with RELAX NG (at least in my experience) will tell
> > you that he/she didn't have any problems with it. The only problem is
> > that big vendors for some reason doesn't want to add support for
> > another schema language into their toolkits. This means that RELAX NG
> > is now used mainly only by informed experts, but not by masses of
> > developers.
> >
> Well, as a person at a big vendor who has the job of tracking the status
> / mindshare / demand for various XML specs, I can tell you the reason:
> Almost no demand by actual paying customers. This is not FUD; Dare, and
> Derek IIRC, I, and others have thought "cool, all I have to do is make a
> business case and Microsoft will support RELAX NG and lead us out of the
> XSD dark ages" Trouble is, we just have nothing to work with to make
> such a case. It's not just us; I don't think XML Spy or Stylus Studio
> support RELAX NG either, AFAIK for the same reason.
>
> As far as I can tell, the masses of developers aren't clamoring for
> RELAX NG because they don't use any schema language except via some
> tool, and the tools don't support it. Even if they did the schema files
> would just be some semi-opaque stuff in a project directory, not
> anything most developers would care much about the syntax of. I also
> used to think that was cynical FUD from the tool vendors, but, ahem,
> nobody is making much money off tools these days but customer support
> costs bazillions. I guarantee you that upper management would insist
> that we support RELAX NG if anyone could make the case that it really
> would reduce support costs but reduce XML tools revenue. That would be a
> very easy tradeoff to make.
>
> Bottom line seems to be that XSD, like RSS, , OPML, etc., are specs that
> the experts mostly hate but the paying customers more or less happily
> consume. Figure out how to get around that dilemma and you'll be a hero.
>
>
>
>
>
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