Product idea re. fP and Windows

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006, Fairlight wrote:

> fP can also do serial port work with OUTS, et al, can it not?  I guess the
> question is, who has a more robust implementation, and can yours do USB
> where theirs likely does not?

Apparently OUTS does not work with some modems. But maybe we could go OUTS 
to one serial port wired to another serial port monitored by my 
software... Nah!

> ... 
> Besides that, though, you have to look at what you're basing this premise
> on; namely, you're basing it on their sockets license addon.  I just
> looked at their pricing, and it's $995 per 5 users, minimum 5 user blocks
> according to their web site.  You're talking about an additional $200/user
> to be able to dial a phone, eject a disc, or any of the other things you
> mentioned.  That's pretty significant middleware overhead per user for
> tasks that really don't seem to be worth that cost, IMHO.

A couple of other people have pointed out (off-list) that there is an 
extra charge for this, which I did not know.

> ... 
> I'll be bluntly honest:  This makes 320% less sense than bundling ssh into
> Anzio Lite, which you at one point (I could look it up in the archives)
> told me would never happen due to support costs.  Obviously that happened,
> but it made sense that you should eventually change your mind.  But here,
> you're talking about something catering design towards one product in
> particular, which is a niche program whose community is a notoriously hard
> sell, with significantly lower volume than you'd get in general for ssh in
> your flagship product.  And with that tiny, tiny volume you'd probably be
> incurring a lot of support costs dealing with people that aren't used to
> dealing with socket programming at all.  I doubt even making it a premium
> support channel would justify development costs.

You've got a point. Then again, filePro might not be the only market for 
this.

Thanks for your input.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
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