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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: X-Ray Man who wrote (7921)	1/22/1998 12:46:00 PM
From: Sowbug	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

nothing says Apple has to dump FM Pro to provide a hi-end DB Right, and maybe they won't. But what's the difference between low-end and high-end? FM Pro mail order costs $199, and if you're dumb enough to buy Microsoft Access alone, you'll pay only $100 more than that. Most people would buy Microsoft Office, paying $420 or so for it, and get Access bundled along with it at no additional cost (not free, of course, but you end up getting Access, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which is pretty much all any business needs to get along). I don't know if you've used Microsoft's wizards, but they do a pretty good job of getting beginners going, and I think that helps 90% of the people who are trying to migrate and just want a contact or invoice database. For really low-end, there is always ClarisWorks. Any business needing relational database capabilities is going to hire somebody to do the customization, meaning the difference between buying the high-end and low-end application will be trivial compared to the cost of getting the customization going. I'm sure there's some market in between what I've described, but how big can it be? Think about it -- the businesses and individuals who really need relational databases (thereby ruling out ClarisWorks) but are too broke to afford Microsoft Access, which they'd have anyway if they bought Microsoft Office? How many customers could possibly fall into that category? I think you and I are closer in opinion than it seems. We both appreciate FM Pro for what it is and we both agree that Apple needs a high-visibility, high-powered DB app. I don't really have an opinion whether Apple should dump FM Pro, but it's never shown the ability to market successfully to different echelons of the same sector (e.g., System 7 Pro, the Centris series, the Apple ///, the Mac IIvx and the whole 400-500 series with the dozens and dozens of different model numbers).