Re: Symbolics Marketing Strategy

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Thu, 25 Jan 90 11:50 EST
    From: miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller)

    The problem I see with this strategy is that it reinforces the idea that
    Symbolics has to make their money on the hardware. People buy their systems
    for the software, and NOT the hardware. I'd much rather see them price their
    software according to what the market will bear, and make it available on a
    variety of platforms. Concordia, for instance, needs to be price competitve
    and marketed as an alternative to FrameMaker.

Actually, it needs to be much cheaper.  FrameMaker and Interleaf can be
run on existing Suns and Macintoshes, but it seems unlikely that the
technical writing staff will already have Lispms.  I didn't even try to
convince my management to switch from Interleaf to Concordia for our
documentation because I knew that they wouldn't want to buy Lispms for
the documentation people.  So, the cost of the Lispm, as well as the its
image as an AI or CASE machine, must be factored in when trying to
market Concordia.

                                                barmar