It sounds to me like the real war is between MSFT standards and RNWK.
You've been watching this more than me. Tell me what you think of this:
PRO-MSFT arguments:
1) They own the damn browser market and can do all kinds of things to make their product perform better and the other product look a little worse.
3) They have more $$$ and more programmers (and the RNWK source code).
4) They can twist a lot of arms, as the feds have found out.
5) Let's have a quiz...can anybody guess what the next product to be bundled into the MSFT OS (and browser) will be? It will not only be free but it will do everything the most expensive version of RNWK will do. Can you spell dumping?
PRO-RNWK arguments:
1) They own 80% of the market.
2) Nobody likes a MSFT monopoly. Free today and big $$ tomorrow.
3) IBM and others are starting to pump money into RNWK because they see this.
4) RNWK is the only real alternative to MSFT.
5) If RNWK works real hard and makes a lot of deals (netscape, AOl, etc.), they can establish themselves as a standard that will be hard to replace.
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IMHO, from what I see, RNWK should buy/merge with somebody like Cakewalk (http://www.cakewalk.com/) that is deeply embedded in the music/broadcast industry and has a enormous media creation package with a very deep subscriber list.
This is natural fit that MSFT can't do.
Then you offer a whole line of products with a killer low end free package that is open source. This will bring droves of fans from Linux, Apachae, etc. You make your living on selling the higher end products and services. Do the red hat routine selling service + the product ("How to Produce Multi-Media", etc.). As we now go into broadband, everyone will need to learn how to do some multimedia just like everyone living in the modern world needs to know how to do a simple web page. It will be our primary form of communication (replacing much of our typing).
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Not many people have beat Godzilla.
The only good example I can think of is Adobe.
Photoshop is so overwhelmingly big, and established such a large following, that MSFT simply couldn't compete. They got deep into the professional market before MSFT knew what was happening. This was even more true with Illustrator because there was more to the product. When MSFT tried to beat .eps with .wmf (Windows MetaFile), it failed miserably.
So, again, the moral of the story is to have a product that is very deep and very big with lots of followers. Give away a light version that is better than anything on the market. Bundle the lite with a ton of products (computers, digital VCRs, etc). Develop a community of users. People make big money putting on seminars explaining how to use photoshop and illustrator. You can earn a living if you know how to use the product real well because it is time consuming to do a good job (and it requires creativity). The same should be true for the RNWK product if it is going to win the battle.
It took a lot of ships to sink the Bismark. |
