making mcl profitable

[Brad Miller <miller@cs.rochester.edu>]

Actually given the number of companies that stay afloat on the basis of
upgrade volume, why not develop MCL 3.0 with PPC support sold as a
(roughly) $200 upgrade (again?, oy!); but give away MCL 2.0 with every
PPC mac. You'd increase your user base, since free development system is
at least going to get *tried*. And if a customer wants to use it for
delivery, they'll probably need 3.0 (and can afford it).

2.0 being a "sunk cost" doesn't cost anything to give away, esp. if
development is discontinued anyway. Charge for support of the free
product too. (or be like MPW and just don't support it :-).

But really the problem is that Apple seems to think software needs to be
profitable independant of hardware. With some software, that makes
sense, but development environments are a special case: they grow the
3rd party software base, which grows the market for the hardware.

People buy hardware to run software, not vice-versa. I doubt Microsoft
makes anything on their development tools given how cheap they are,
(printing the manuals probably costs more!) but they sell a lot of
copies of MS-DOS and Windows because that's what the software will need
to run...

Hypercard only became popular because Apple gave it away. What could it
hurt to at least try the same strategy with MCL at this point?

Regards,
--
Brad Miller
Computer Science Dept.
University of Rochester