🚀 go-pugleaf

Mustafa Soysal MS57 wrote:
>
> If you don't mind David, tell us how many peoople registered your mine
> sweeper game for OS/2?  Got to be at least one person which was me...

I got about 30 registrations in the first year.  A few since then.
I've taken in about $500 total (about 50 people).  But this figure
is meaningless because:

1: The program is free.  I did not cripple it in any way.  I did not
   even demand money.  Any money sent to me is purely voluntary.  The
   program explicitly says you don't have to send anything.  (It is
   "guilt-ware": you don't have to send money, but what would your
   mother think?)

2: I did almost no advertising.  My advertising consists of:
	1: uploading to two ftp sites
	2: posting it to comp.binaries.os2
	3: posting a pointer to it in comp.os.os2.announce
   and nothing else.  I'm amazed people even know it exists.

3: I haven't released an update in over 2 years.  (which reminds me.  I
   have a version 1.3 on my hard drive at home.  I'll have to upload an
   update one of these days.)

4: Someone else wrote a competing MineSweeper program that has
   multimedia sound in it.
 
> UnTieCom(tm) got about 200 customers at most, a lot of them not regisreted.
> I haven't compiled the exact numbers.

On the other hand, there are the SIO device drivers which seem to have
earned the author a significant amount of money.

You really can't compare the shareware market to the commercial market.
Success in shareware is always a crap shoot.
 
> >give a stuff about OS/2, never have, never will" at least customers
> >would have known where they stood, and another company might have
> >been able to take up the slack.  As it is, there are still no really
> >effective office suites for OS/2, tho' you can hack together
> >substitutes; and I suspect that's a large part of why OS/2 is dead
> 
> I agree with that....Let's move on to Windows as our finances permit.

OS/2 is not dead.  It's just not as visible as you'd like.  IBM made
a conscious decision to push OS/2 into the business market and pretty
much forget the home market.  And I can understand completely.  The
home market only wants games, and you lose money on every copy sold,
because every customer needs tons of tech support.

And I'll tell you right now: if all I wanted to do with my computer
is play games and do web surfing, I'd be using Win95.  And if all I
wanted to do is run office suites and web surfing, I'd be using NT.

But I do more than that.  I develop and use large complex programs
that must be fast and reliable.  I can do that far easier on the
OS/2 platform than I can do on any other PC-based platform.  (I
also have this idea of using VoiceType for hands-free web surfing,
which I will do once I get a computer fast enough for VT.)
 
> >in the water.  A decent native office suite, a couple of years ago,
> >might actually have saved Warp 3.0; it had almost everything else.
> 
> Well, I do have the Smartsuite that came out initially.

And there are others out there.  I know of at least three office
suites that can be purchased.  Yes, you have to mail order them, but
you can't blame IBM because CompUSA takes orders from Microsoft.

The real problem is that a lot of the office-suite-using community
wants MS Word, and they won't be happy with ANYTHING else, no matter
how good it might be.  And Microsoft is more than happy to refuse to
give it to them.  There is no way anybody can break that kind of a
market stranglehold.  And nobody should be trying to.

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