🚀 go-pugleaf

dea@astral.magic.ca (Don Andrachuk) wrote:
>In article <42ds6l$69p@sloth.swcp.com>, "Harlan W. Stockman"
><hwstock@swcp.com> wrote:
>
>[snip]
>> However, I think it is 
>> important to recommend your honesty to your CEO, so he can appreciate your 
>> altruistic bent in ignoring the OS that commands about 90% of the market.

>Say what?
>Ninety per cent! Yet another delusional post from a Wintel user. Window
>3.x has less than 60% of the desktop O/S market. Win95 has close to >*zero* per cent.

The desktop TCP/IP market (at least the part that one can profit from) 
is probably at least 90% PC-oriented.  After all, Macs have Appletalk, 
and Unix boxes have TCP/IP built into the OS.  The "share" game is a 
little fuzzy, since it is never clear how far back one should go in 
the calculation (e.g., what is the CDC NOS share, or the CP/M share?).  
Apple is making money and fine machines (no sarcasm intended), but 
last I checked, the Wall Street Journal said Apple had dropped to less 
than 10% of market share (to be brutal, the share was listed as about 
6%, but I find that a little hard to believe).

Like it or not, within a few months the installed base of Win95 will 
probably exceed the installed base of System 7. 


>In any case, I think you completely missed the point of the article,
>Harlan. It clearly is *not* altruism that motivates either the writer or
>his employer from possibly dropping support for Win95 - it is economic
>necessity. They are apparently coming to the conclusion that the return
>from Win95 product development (at least for the  TCP/IP-based product he
>was referring to) does not justify the excessive development costs of
>same.


Elsewhere, I was engaging in a bit of irony.  A big reason Chilton's 
company would have a hard time making money on PC TCP/IP apps is: 

 people expect these apps to be very inexpensive, or free.

Microsoft has been bundling Winsock TCP/IP and mail with WfW for some 
time, and gives away its Spartan 32-bit telnet and ftp apps (at 
ftp.microsft.com).  Universities sponsor several very good freeware 
telnet and ftp apps for Windows (e.g. WS_FTP32), WinQVT is cheap, and 
Mosaic-in-a-box sells for about $16.  AOL and other online services 
give away WWW browsers. 

Chilton indicates it is much more difficult to write TCP/IP apps for 
Windows than for MacOS.  Maybe it is, but apparently a lot of folks 
have been up to the challenge, given the large number of cheap/free 
Windows and DOS TCP/IP apps out there since 1992.



>Don Andrachuk
>DEA Systems
Drug Enforcement Agency?  Turn that stuff in, Don!