Marketing Tools
Volume Number: 6
Issue Number: 3
Column Tag: Developer Notes
Marketing Mac Tools 
By Steve Jasik, Menlo Park, CA
Jasik on Marketing Developer Tools for the Macintosh
Guy Kawasaki is fond of quoting Gassée on the difference between advertising and
public relations. The former is when you say that you are great, and the latter is when
your (former) girlfriends say you are great. It’s been almost three years since I
wrote an article for MacTutor on Nosy or The Debugger. This time I took Guy’s advice
and let someone else write a review of the latest version of The Debugger.
While marketing issues are not usually discussed in MacTutor, every software
entrepreneur has to give them consideration. As one who has managed to make a decent
living over the past five years, I thought an article on my experience would be of some
interest.
As two general references to high tech marketing, both Guy Kawasaki’s recently
released book, “The Macintosh Way” (Scott-Foresman), and Regis McKenna’s “The
Regis Touch” (Addison-Wesley) are must reads. Guy was the head of Evangelism at
Apple from 1983 to 1987. His book contains many entertaining and informative
insights into the Mac market. Regis McKenna (and his PR firm by the same name)
have been associated with Apple since its founding days, he is one of the gurus of high
tech marketing. I have used some of the strategies suggested in his book.
The opening paragraph of William Davidow’s book, Marketing High Technology
(Macmillian) is:
“Marketing is civilized warfare. If you find that metaphor too brutal, or if you
are not prepared to fight, you should not enlist. As long as aggressive competitors exist
-- and in this rich and dynamic world they always will -- you will be under attack.
Your competitor’s job is to capture business and then defend that new perimeter. So is
yours.”
This is nothing new, the electronics industry has been a highly competitive,
cut-throat industry since its founding days. The software industry is no different. As
an example, consider the C compilers on the Mac. Bill Duvall’s Consulair C was the
first native C compiler for the Macintosh, and he cleaned up in the first year. Along
came Think with LightspeedC™, and now only the old timers have heard of Consulair .
When the competition becomes unfair, court cases may ensue. IBM forked over its
Service Bureau Corporation and $50 million in cash to CDC in 1974 in an out of court
settlement over the issues of “Paper Tiger” machines and predatory pricing. The
value of the settlement was about $500 million.
The Mac market is growing rapidly, but it is only one-tenth the size of the (IBM)
PC market. The market for developer tools is a small part of the overall market,
consisting of about 10,000 Apple Partners (certified developers), an unknown
number of Apple associates, part time developers and students. Outside of Apple, the
only company with a big presence in the tools and languages market is the Think
division of Symantec. Apple’s developer software is sold at a loss, by an in-house
APDA with an uneven discounting policy towards third party developers. Venture
capital is not available for system related software. Borland has left the Mac tools
market, Microsoft is a minor player with QuickBasic, and I hear that the Think
division of Symantec is marginally profitable. Is there something rotten in
Denmark??
MacTutor magazine is the only relevant (and reasonably priced) advertising
medium for the third party developer of language related products. A full page in
MacUser or MacWorld starts at $6500 a month.
As to “Tupperware” parties, there are only a few user groups that a developer of
a tool can profitably appear before. They are the BCS MacTech group in Boston, the
Mac SIG of the Software Entrepreneur Forum in Palo Alto, the Austin Mac Developers,
and possibly the Berkeley MUG, or its tech group.
In addition to the above facts, one has to take into consideration that Apple, with
its army of software developers, who are subsidized by hardware sales and propaganda
from its publications, are taking over many areas which were previously the domain
of third parties. Given Apple’s brand name recognition, a product has only to exist for
them to move it, and possibly destroy your market in the process.
To be successful as a third party software or hardware developer, one has to find
areas Apple has not or will not enter, move quickly, provide good support, and be
prepared to change direction very fast in that event that the 5 ton elephant called Apple
comes rumbling in your direction.
For those of us, like me, who are marketing products to a niche market, there are
a variety of paths we can take. Freeware, shareware and self published are three
alternatives to the standard route of letting someone else publish for you. Freeware is
one way to get feedback about your product, but once it goes into the public domain for
any length of time you may have trouble selling it commercially. If you need to make a
living, then forget the shareware route, you will be better off buying lottery tickets.
The only people who have made a living from shareware are Bob Wallace (PC Write),
Don Brown (CE Software) and Scott Watson (White Knight - formerly Red Ryder).
John Mitchell, the author of Fedit, eventually went self published with it. Boomerang,
which I use and think is an excellent product, just changed from freeware to a
shareware. I think that the author would make more money by going commercial with
it as Raymond Lau has done with Stuffit.
MacNosy and The Debugger, a Case History
When MacNosy was introduced in January 1985, there was a clear need for more
information about the Macintosh ROMs. The combination of the complicated and little
understood Graphic User Interface used in the Mac, the lack of documentation, and the
paranoia of Steve Jobs made it fairly easy for me to get “ink” from computer
columnists such as John Dvorak, and John Markoff. Markoff wrote a terrific
description of MacNosy in his column in the May 1985 issue of Byte that really helped
sales. He is currently at the NY Times. Another important form of marketing is word
of mouth via the electronic services. Dennis Brothers, the author of Microphone, was
then the Sysop of the Mac Developers SIG on CompuServe, and a beta tester of MacNosy.
Version 1 of Nosy did not have a window mode, and was hard to use. Early in
1986 I added a window mode in which most commands could be performed. After a
conversation with ICOM Simulations, it was apparent that they were not going to extend
their debugger, TMON, to do some of the things that I considered essential. We also had
some conversations about me buying it, but nothing ever came from them. I set to
work on extending the technology in Nosy to produce a debugger. The Debugger was
introduced in November 1986, as a high level symbolic debugger for applications only.
My article in the April 1987 issue of MacTutor (reprinted in Volume 3 of MacTutor)
describes its features.
With the introduction of the Mac II, I changed direction by putting the emphasis
on The Debugger. The shift was due to the discovery that more people wanted to look at
the workings of their own programs than others, or the ROMs. I later changed the
name of the package to “The Debugger and MacNosy” to reflect the shift, but most
users still refer to it as Nosy, and get the two products confused. Version 2 of The
Debugger which supported the debugging of code resources (INITs, DRVRs ) and
multiple tasks at a time, was introduced in June 1988.
With the advent of MPW 3.0 and the “.SYM” file format I was able to add source
level debugging to The Debugger. Now Apple both giveth, and Apple taketh. They gave
us a semi-open architecture product, namely MPW, and a spec for source level
debugging that their compilers and linker met. They also gave us their rendition of a
source level debugger in the form of SADE, which is an obvious threat to my market.
In the process of doing this, they forgot to do a number of things, foremost being to
make the “ system” run at an acceptable speed. Compile times were up by a factor of
two, link times by a factor of three, and SADE was slow to the point that I usually write
its name as SADe. That some heads haven’t been chopped off for it is rather amazing.
I’ve seen vice presidents escorted out the door for less! But in deference to large
corporations in general, I should point out that we used to say that “XYZ doesn’t release
software, it escapes” (despite the best efforts of the Software QA group). It appears
that MPW 3.0 is an example of that.
For a few months I fumed at the Apple for producing a system which was so slow.
Then the impetus for doing an incremental linker for MPW came from a conversation
with one of my customers (this is what it means to be market driven). That was in
March of 89. Two months later I had PatchLink running, and the Pascal compiler
patched for incremental compilation in time for the Spring Developers conference.
When I demoed it at one of the sessions, Apple engineers in the MPW group who I had
given up on talking to, visited my “booth”. I shipped the release version of IBS on
September 1, and in the process of beta testing it has converted many of the major
users of MPW (Claris, Aldus, Odesta, Oracle, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Acius, )
over to using my debugger and IBS. The lesson to you is that in order to “beat” Apple
(or any other company) in a given market, you have to offer the potential customer
something unique that sets your product apart from theirs. IBS with Instant Link did
just that. Many large programs that are being developed on the Mac, such as the next
version of PageMaker, have link times that run between 5 and 15 minutes. This slow
turnaround time negates the interactive nature of program development on the
Macintosh, and is expensive to companies that are paying real money to their
programmers.
The penalty for failing to position your product as a unique entity in relation to
your competitors is that you may end up in a commodity war in which price,
availability and the market identity of your brand will be the determinants. As an
example, consider Resourcer by Doug McKenna. It is a distinct improvement over
Apple’s ResEdit, but is there enough utility or difference in it for you to spend $100
or so on it?
While the taste of victory is sweet, one has to keep in mind that there are more of
them at Apple than you or I, and eventually like the Russian Army and Napoleon, they
will get us by attrition in the long Russian Winter. While they are promising an
incremental linker for a future version of MPW in 1991, I still have a couple of
rabbits in my hat that will keep me a step or two ahead of MPW. Given their financial
resources, the question is why haven’t they built a system with incremental linking
years ago? Both Think’s Lightspeed C and Pascal have had integrated project managers
with incremental linkers for over four years. If they are so smart, why has it taken
Apple so long?
Now a bit more on my current marketing strategy. When APDA moved in-house
last year I lost one of my primary distribution channels. The old APDA sold my
product at the discounted price of $275, and the new (Apple) APDA has deemed that my
product is not popular, and should be sold at my suggested list price of $350
(catch-22). This has cost me about 20% of my sales. My solution to this problem has
been to go after site licenses at the major Mac developers (Claris, Aldus, ) to make
up for the slack. The reasoning being that a sales trip via airplane costs about $800,
and if I can put myself in front of $10K or so of potential customers, then it is worth
the trip. So far this strategy appears to be working.
Let me close by saying that I haven’t recounted horror stories that some
developers have had with their distributors, or talked about what trade shows are
worth while for tools. The MacWorld conferences are not attracting the right crowd
for me. There are many opportunities for new and innovative products in the Mac
market, just don’t expect to get rich in the tools and languages area.