HoTMetaL, the biggest marketing disaster of the Internet 90's?
What happened? sq.com poignantly says it all viz a viz HotMetaL 2.0, HoTMetaL 3.0 and HoTMetaL 4.0 awards. SoftQuad owned Web authoring(.) SoftQuad was the Web authoring tool before the Internet arrived. SoftQuad was driving the Internet. SoftQuad was driving the paradigm shift...but then HoTMetaL lost considerable market share when it released HoTMetaL 3.0 late and without a site creation and management tool, all concomitant with virtually no marketing but instead with an apparent arrogance and false sense of security that the Internet phenomenon and inertia would have to carry HoTMetaL 2.0 with it. Enter Microsoft's Steve 'Proctor & Gamble' Ballmer, NetObjects Fusion, the marketing HotDogs, et al...aggressively funded marketing preemptive strikes with surgical precision ensued...SoftQuad's continued patterns of its false sense of security and low bandwidth in the marketing department took the hottest product in the hottest sector of the #3 revenue producer within U.S. GNP...a sector (and paradigm-shift) which is arguably having the biggest effect on the world and humanity, inexorably and irreversibly changing our world (economy (macro/microeconomic level), telecommunications, society, etc)...to a distant third, fourth, fifth, last?...ultimately demanding effectively a reverse merger into Alpha Software given SoftQuad's negligible HoTMetaL revenues (and crashing market share) going into Q2 '97...
because there is more to your website than the FrontPage, HotMetaL 4.0--too little too late? or more appropriately
...because there is more to your company than HoTMetaL, Alpha Software. |
