From The T.I.E.&M. Shop
Dear Jack Daniels...
 JD> Hello Richard,
 JD> I have been following the discussion regarding the merits of printed
 JD> manuals versus the power of the online help system in TSE Pro. (mostly
 JD> as it relates to the new V2.5 supplement). It is quite interesting, but
 JD> not surprising,  that different users have or prefer different learning
 JD> environments. What's that old adage: Different strokes for different
 JD> folks?
 JD> I applaud Semware's desire to contain costs; I read in one of the
 JD> messages, I can't recall the individual who said it, that he/she would
 JD> rather have the money invested in the program itself rather than in
 JD> nice printed manuals. I wholeheartedly agree!
Contain costs? Have you done the math recently? If Semware
charges $50 for each of its upgrades, and produces a new upgrade
each year, and its happy 100,000 registered users purchase each
of these new upgrades, it comes to $5,000,000 per year. The
printing costs of the manuals could not be more than a dollar
each, but say it's five dollars...that's only $500,000 for the
manual. Add another $500,000 to produce the disks and packaging,
and you see a net profit of $4,000,000 for one year.
For only ONE of its products...there are more, of course.
But...if their new accountants and lawyers apply their trades to
protect SemWare's interests, then there's going to be less beef
in the hamburgers, and more charges for the leavings, and it's
beginning to look that way.
I can't believe that SemWare has produced a product without a
manual.
One by one, the shareware products I have come to love are
either disappearing or going retail...PCWrite, Procomm,
SuperBBS, Silver Xpress, Bluewave, MKQWK, ....
QEdit?
Terra Firma is not so firma as it used to be...CP/M's gone,
MSDOS is going, and I HATE Windows...:(
Same thing happened to cars, come to think of it...
See you.
Larry
... Black holes were created when God divided by zero
--- GEcho 1.11+
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