If you think you know about shareware you should think again! Almost every author who puts a shareware product on the market makes some kind of pitch to support shareware. They have tried every trick in the book to get people to send in their shareware fees for using their products. Unfortunately, they do not tell you the real story. Without the real story the user just sees someone who wants to get paid. It is a lot more than that, so, here is the real story…
First, you need to understand how the world works when it comes to normal software distribution. You have developed the next software revolution and you want a distributor to take your product and put it in stores. You have every confidence you will sell millions of copies. The distributor, however, has a different perspective. They think you are lucky to get phone time with them and they are not about to take ANY risk whatsoever with your new product. In fact, if there is anything you should understand it is that distributors will take NO risks. After a great deal of aggressive selling you convince them you do, in fact, have a pretty good shot at making some real sales.
After pulling your chain for weeks they grudgingly say "Ok, we'll give it a try, but, you have to agree to take back any units we cannot sell." (that's always a condition) In your naive enthusiasm you say "No problem!". They hand you an order for say, 5,000 units.
Well, let's just take a close look at that order. First, a retailer is not going to put anything on their shelves that isn't going to make them 20 or 30 dollars a sale and they want to make twice the cost of the product. Your product must be sufficiently priced to warrant their shelf space. So, if your product is to sell for $100 the retailer is not going to pay more than $50 for it.
Now, the distributor has sort of the same attitude. They want to make twice their money on the product as well, so, they get $25 for each unit they sell to the retailer for $50, which brings us back to you. You wind up with $25 for each unit, right? Well, not exactly. See, the distributor says "Here, this order is for 5,000 units and after you ship them to us you can bill us and we'll pay you in 30 days." They do NOT hand you a check for $125,000 and ask you to ship the software right away.
Ok, hmmmmmm… you stand to make $125,000 and you like that. It's a good start. Now all you have to do is put 5,000 of these things together, ship them to the distributor, and wait for your check and a new order. Uh huh.
5,000 disks, 5,000 manuals, warranty cards, boxes, labels, wrappers.... uh, shrink wrap machine, disk duplication, shipping cartons, shipping fees, some people to put it all together... that'll cost about $18 to $20 per unit. So, all you need to do is spend $100,000 to ship these to the distributor. Where in the hell are you going to get $100,000.
With order in hand you manage to convince a bank, some friends, relatives, and the Small Business Administration to fork over the bucks, with interest of course, and, in four or five weeks you have managed to put it all together. You're helping load all 5,000 units into the back of a truck headed for your distributor. Now, in 30 days you think you'll have a check, pay your bills, and start on the second order.
May as well bark at the moon!
The distributor takes it to the computer store and says, "Hey, you gotta try this hot new item, and, oh by the way, if it doesn't work out well take it back for full credit." What the heck, the store owner has nothing to lose. It's on the shelf, and, with nothing to lose, little effort is made to push the product.
When I had ToolKit‚Ñ¢ on store shelves I would walk in and watch people go to the cash register with HyperCard related products and never once did I hear a salesperson say, "Oh, I see you have an interest in HyperCard. Have you heard of ToolKit‚Ñ¢? We just got it in and it is terrific." Never ANY attempt to push products.
Anyway, back to the story… six weeks go by and you still do not have a check from the distributor. You call and they say it is in the works. The check will be out in the next printing… terribly sorry we didn't catch it sooner. Meanwhile, the computer store says to the distributor, "Hey, these aren't selling so take em back". Distributor says, "Ok, tell you what I'm gonna do… rather than pay you a refund (something they NEVER do) I'll put this new product we just got on your shelf in its place and we'll see how that does." All this time the distributor is getting paid by the store because the store knows how dependent they are on the distributor.
Days later you get a check for 2,000 units with a notice that 3,000 units are on their way back to you. There won't be a follow up order. Terribly sorry it didn't do so well.
Think of what has happened. The retailer took no risk. The distributor took NO risk and delayed your payment to make sure they only paid you for what they could sell. They made a profit. The retailer made a profit.
You, however, took all the risk, even to the point of financing the computer stores inventory. You lost your ass, and any other body parts attached to it. You are in debt for years and now you think you really will go bark at the moon.
Distributors sometimes do work well for products that have a good mass appeal. If you can afford to advertise and keep bankrolling the product for a half year to a year until the product catches on you might make a run of it.
To sell ToolKit‚Ñ¢ through normal software distribution channels would be stupid. It might be argued that distributors can reach ten times the number of customers but at one tenth the profit and 50 times the aggravation who needs it.
The real problem though is in the nature of the product. If it is not a whiz bang game, word processor, or widget that will appeal to every Macintosh owner then normal distribution is not going to have a prayer.
ToolKit‚Ñ¢ is like that. Not everyone who buys a computer buys a Macintosh, and not everyone who buys a Macintosh buys HyperCard. Not everyone who buys HyperCard has any interest in creating a stack. When it is all said and done, the market for ToolKit‚Ñ¢ is very narrow.
It does not matter that previous owners of ToolKit‚Ñ¢ have said they would gladly pay any price for ToolKit‚Ñ¢ or that it was, indeed, used on the space shuttle (really!). What matters is that new users of HyperCard get the message that ToolKit‚Ñ¢ provides essential benefits for them when they develop stacks. Advertising is one of the most expensive components of marketing a product.
Where did ToolKit‚Ñ¢ come from? When I was at Apple Computer as a senior software engineer I worked on many applications. It became increasingly more difficult to change the interface when writing code in Pascal or C, especially when everyone in any given staff meeting would call home to see what changes their cat would like to see in the program. I moved to HyperCard to prototype the interface because changes could be made on the spot. Consequently, I developed quite a few tools to facilitate my efforts in HyperCard. Word got around and pretty soon people were coming from all over asking for copies of the tools.
I finally left Apple to start my own company. I decided to refine and consolidate these HyperCard tools of mine into a product. For six solid months I worked on version 1.0 of ToolKit™. My shortest week was 104 hours. 15 or more hours every single day, seven days a week, for six months without a single day off! Every week I worked 2 1/2 man weeks. Don’t believe me? Call my wife!
You have to remember, HyperCard was enjoying a pretty healthy interest. After all, it came free with every Macintosh sold. Then apple pulled HyperCard from the box and gave it to Claris who announced they were going to “go on the road” to see what HyperCard users really wanted. We all saw what that got us. After 2.0 came out my customers were asking for upgrades because some of the XCMDs would not work properly. Ok, I upgraded. Struggling to keep ToolKit™ alive I further refined the product to version 4.0.
By this time, HyperCard had fallen into the sea. Interest in the product had evaporated. I stopped all work on the time consuming product and moved on to other things. From time to time I would be urged by old customers to upgrade or add a feature. With apologies I had to beg off. Reluctantly, I gave ToolKit‚Ñ¢ up for dead.
Throughout the next two years I would periodically peek into the HyperCard forums of my favorite bulletin boards. Things were pretty dismal. Then, about four or five months ago I started to notice quite a remarkable rebirth of interest in HyperCard. I suspect the improved economy, the announcement of version 2.2 coming soon, and the thrust of multimedia all had an impact. I put out some feelers and was encouraged to revive ToolKit‚Ñ¢.
Just what did it take to get this product to you? Keep in mind this is version 5.0. I was able to salvage about 40% of the code from previous versions. At first I thought I would just pull old 4.0 out of the box and put it out as shareware. However, I really wanted to strip out some old features and add several improvements to the product. So, it is 2 1/2 months later and I have taken one (1) day off. I have worked no less than 15 hours each day, of each week, of each month. It takes an enormous amount of energy and effort to do something like this. People who do not do it simply do not know. It amazes me how most non-programmers think things like scrolling, or say, using text is like HyperCard… they think these things are built into the Macintosh and all I have to do is write a few scripts to make it happen. Folks, it ain't so!
It is, essentially, a nightmare to program the Macintosh. Finding information is not as simple as looking it up in "Inside Macintosh" and copying a few lines of example code. Finding out how to do things on the Macintosh is like hunting for hens teeth. Examples to do really interesting things do not exist. NOBODY will share their source code, and at least 50% of all the books are fluff put together to make a fast buck.
This product was done entirely by one person, me. I did the writing, coding, artwork, design, testing, graphics, and every other detail needed to put this software on your computer. My wife fed me and put up with my fits. This is certainly not to brag, just to let you know I had a lot of things to do to make it happen.
I had so much to learn. For instance, in the beginning I was eager to spread ToolKit‚Ñ¢ around. Many people requested free evaluation copies. At first I heard they would write a review on the product or they worked for a large computer store and wanted to carry ToolKit‚Ñ¢. Nothing ever came of them. Finally, I insisted requests be made on company letterhead with an explanation of why they wanted the evaluation copy and what they intended to do with it. After 50 copies went out and not ONE SINGLE RESULT materialized I was wondering what was going on.
My first concern was that the product was not received well. My customers, however, were raving about it. Something was not right here. Eventually, I discovered there was a whole community of nice people out there that used any excuse to get free software. These thieves were taking me to the cleaners. I even discovered a couple of stores who just put the evaluation copy on the shelf and sold it. In time I learned any legitimate company was quite willing to pay for a copy to "evaluate" and always followed up with an order.
Naturally, I believed ToolKit‚Ñ¢ was a ten mouse product, even though the highest rating MacUser would give is five mice. I struggled for months to get the product reviewed. Finally someone reviewed it in the October 1990 issue of MacUser. It got 4 1/2 mice. I have done my best to exploit that as much as possible, but, I'll have to be honest. This reviewer knew nothing of HyperCard and in the short review made 17 mistakes, even getting the company name wrong. What I learned was that people who write reviews are often in the business of writing and may not have a clue about the real advantages or disadvantages of a product.
This might be a good place to enter my two cents about HyperCard. I am often asked what I think of HyperCard? Well, it is one of the best products and one of the worst. It is the ultimate object oriented programming platform but its implementation is hideous. There is no question this product has been pooly managed and it looks like nothing has changed. Instead of putting any real functional and useful changes into the new release we have the "Preview" in the button and field dialogs, a color XCMD that is a memory hog and a nightmare of complexity, new buttons (oval and popup) that are just plain silly, and a slower than ever HyperCard. As far as I am concerned only one good thing exists in the new version, the ability to produce stand alone applications. Even that was botched…
Stand alone applications produced from HyperCard have every conceivable resource in them with no attempt to edit out the ones not used. Furthermore, you still have to hopscotch around through several dialog boxes to set up a button or field and you do not get returned to the original dialog box when you are done. But hey, we get OSA, more complexity, button and field "Preview" and WorldScript support… things most HyperCard developers couldn't care less about. Just fluff to pump up the product. I was truly amused with the prerelease statements that said HyperCard had full color support and buttons were no longer restricted to rectangle shapes.
The real point of all this is that the HyperCard development team has missed the point.
My experience, on the front line, is that HyperCard has brought many people to the world of software development who would otherwise have never given it a thought. It was supposed to be the programming language for the rest of us! What Apple/Claris/Apple has succeeded in doing is making a potentially elegant development platform into a quagmire of stupidity and complexity. I am experienced in many programming languages so I manage pretty well. However, I like to remind myself once in awhile, that I too was a beginner and I cannot see how any newcomer can look at HyperCard today without being discouraged.
The real value in the box is the ADDmotion II software that comes with it. These people did an outstanding job of producing a fun piece of software.
Don't get me wrong. I use HyperCard and the product has been good to me. I am about to use it in another project. My only regret is that as the development team and front runner developers using HyperCard have learned and progressed they have left the novices and beginners behind, seriously neglecting them, and have lost sight of their original mandate.
In recent times I have been consulting. I am absolutely useless as an employee in a corporate environment. As a consultant I have a great deal of control and am free from most of the bureaucracy. However, even that has become boring and I'd really rather do creative things, like ToolKit‚Ñ¢. I was making a low of $45 an hour to a high of $120 an hour as a consultant. I made pretty good money and kept working most of the time. Things have changed.
I have come to the conclusion I would rather live in a piano crate on the edge of town than work in a corporate environment again. Money is definitely NOT the issue. I prize freedom and control more than anything else and I am willing to pay the price to have it. I have learned, the hard way, I do not need $100,000 a year to be happy. Just getting by with enough money to pay the bills is all I need if I can do what I want. (it is really all any of us need, but, you'll have to discover that yourself).
Now, if I have, say, 200 ToolKit‚Ñ¢ customers that buy a $10 module from me I can actually survive off that $2,000 for a month. In a month I can produce one or two other fascinating and useful tools. The trouble is most people don't think $10 is very much money and because of that they are not inclined to take the trouble to put the money in the mail. For the low price of ToolKit‚Ñ¢ you can barely send two people to the movies and have pizza afterword. If 1/4 of my 200 customers just don't get around to sending me their $10 then I won't get $2,000. I'll only get $1,500 and I can tell you that I cannot survive on $1,500 a month. I will have NO choice but to drop ToolKit‚Ñ¢ and do something else.
We both lose on that deal and I lose twice. I lose because I don't get to do things like ToolKit‚Ñ¢ and I lose, right along side you, as a consumer, because the shareware market erodes. People cannot afford to produce fun and useful products as shareware if we use the products and don't pay for them. If you think your $10 doesn't mean much you are wrong. You, and I, are left with the distributor, high prices, and lack of support from small companies struggling to stay alive. The little products, those $49.95 gems that can be so valuable to us will never reach the market. As I pointed out earlier, a ToolKit‚Ñ¢ kind of product would never get sold in any case because of its narrow market if it were not for the shareware alternative.
That, my friends, is the real story. When you think of what it takes to write a book, edit it, illustrate it, publish it, etc., even if it appeals to a limited market, say, recipes for boiled swamp twigs, and you can buy that book for $19.95 you have to wonder why software costs so much. I can tell you it takes no more energy to write good software than it does a good book. So why doesn't a word processor cost $20 or $30 instead of $200 or $300? I'll tell you why… the software industry has made itself expensive. It is as simple as that.
Retailers, distributors, and authors have all blindly created the problem. They have elevated themselves to a point that many cannot participate. The key players will tell you that it costs so much to produce their software they have no choice but to price it so high. Uh huh, and if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their asses when they hopped!
If I can sit down in ONE SINGLE 18 HOUR DAY and develop buttons for HyperCard that conform to ANY shape, with color, hiliting, and flashing, why in the hell couldn't Apple do it in years, especially when it is something people have been asking for from the beginning of HyperCard? If they choose to offer popup buttons why don't they support hierarchical menus and ICONs the way every other popup menu XCMD on the boards do?
I am not suggesting for a moment the HyperCard team is a bunch of brainless idiots. On the contrary, I met several of them years ago when I demonstrated ToolKit‚Ñ¢. They understood a good thing when they saw it. In fact, Apple is full of bright and talented people. It just has no vision or leadership. You need only sit in on any staff meeting to start contemplating the number of ways there really are to commit suicide.
I won't go into it! Let's just leave it at this:
Unless there are alternatives created and supported by all of us, the future of computer software looks pretty boring and expensive. That is why shareware is so important.
