<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

[IP] more on The software industry is learning from the RIAA?



Begin forwarded message:

From: Dan Bricklin <danb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 19, 2005 11:57:32 PM EDT
To: Bob Frankston <Bob19-0501@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, 'Brett Glass' <brett@xxxxxxxxxx>, dave@xxxxxxxxxx, 'Ip ip' <ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
Subject: RE: [IP] The software industry is learning from the RIAA?


Brett,
Be careful about your history. You are thinking of VisiOn. Those of us at Software Arts (Bob, me, and many others), were not involved in VisiOn, which was written by developers at our publisher, VisiCorp. VisiOn, for its day, as I recall, was fast (on an 8088, but better on an 8086...) and the resolution was high for a PC (full res of the graphics cards of the day). It had lots of other problems which I won't go into, but it did goad Microsoft into doing Windows, which took them forever (and they got to wait for much more capable hardware). The high prices, as I recall, were for the apps, which were not bundled, and were set around like the prices of 1-2-3, Wordstar, dBase II, etc.
VisiCalc (the product Bob and I did) came out at about $100 (later raised to over $200) -- a steal compared to the $5,000/month you'd pay for timesharing financial forecasting, and had a great, zippy, character-based UI that lasted for many years.
People frequently get our companies confused. It's not fair to the developers of VisiOn (who worked quite hard on it) to assign it to us who get enough credit for doing VisiCalc (which those developers did not do), nor is it fair to us who did lots of good other stuff to remember us for the failed product of the company that sued us as they were releasing their competing spreadsheet on VisiOn. 

-DanB

At 11:26 PM Thursday 5/19/2005, Bob Frankston wrote:


I never worked at VisiCorp -- they were just the marketing company. We
under-priced the prouct and it wasn't a GUI.

-----Original Message-----
From: Brett Glass [mailto:brett@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 12:21
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx; Ip ip
Cc: Bob19-0501@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] The software industry is learning from the RIAA?

This comment is especially noteworthy because it comes from a
charter employee of Visicorp, which as I recall placed a quite
high price tag on its halting, low resolution GUI -- pricing
that product out of the market. ;-)

--Brett Glass

At 07:33 AM 5/19/2005, David Farber wrote:



>Begin forwarded message:
>
>From: Bob Frankston <Bob19-0501@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Date: May 19, 2005 8:10:31 AM EDT
>To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: The software industry is learning from the RIAA?
>
>
>Pirated is not the same as lost sales! But maybe we really do
>want to encourage Asia to have large native software industry to
>compete with us by pricing ourselves out of the market. Its one
>thing to complain about unauthorized copies but another thing to say
>that all copies are lost sales.
>
>
>
>
>
>http://asia.cnet.com/news/software/0,39037051,39230772,00.htm
>
>
>
>Software industry continues to lose billions to piracy
>By Eileen Yu, CNETAsia
>Thursday, May 19 2005 5:46 PM
>
>SINGAPORE--Software piracy rates may have come down, but revenue
>losses continue to climb, according to a recent study released by the
>Business Software Alliance.
>
>Piracy continues to be a major challenge for the global software
>market, said Jeffrey J. Hardee, Asia-Pacific vice president and
>regional director, Business Software Alliance (BSA), an international
>non-profit body dedicated to promoting a "legal digital world".
>
>.
>
>
>
>Bob Frankston http://www.frankston.com
>
>
>
>
>
>-------------------------------------
>You are subscribed as iplist@xxxxxxxxxx
>To manage your subscription, go to
> http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
>
>Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/ interesting-people/ 






-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/