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Technology Stocks : IFMX - Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: treetopflier who wrote (11031)	6/6/1998 3:24:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14631

Free on NT, gosh we beat SYBS and MSFT -- wow!<<< <<snip: rather lengthy sarcasm>> Actually, there is some precedent for this. Oracle became the 'best-selling database' by nearly giving away their windows product in 1992, 150 bucks or so. It was crappy, and they discontinued it soon after, but it got them where they needed to go and killed off IFMX for DOS and other competitors. IFMX can accomplish several things with this move: 1. Achieve some notice in a market they abandoned six years ago or so. 2. Dent the seeming inevitability of SQL Server taking over completely. 3. Create some NT/IFMX developers, perhaps thousands of them who will initially start by using IFMX behind their own web server software. There are hundreds of thousands of folks using free or cheap web servers for their personal servers who also work for other people on their web sites and databases. They could use some free IFMX, which works with Netscape Fasttrack among others. You need these developers because NT developers have nearly all been captured by MSFT through various tactics. You can't sell IFMX into NT without developers to make apps and recommend it. And if you don't do OK on NT in the future you won't do at all. Giving the software away at first and charging later is now an established paradigm for hit software. From Doom to Netscape to C++. Right now with hiring so tight people will eventually buy whatever database they can hire developers for. Actually if IFMX was smarter they would start holding the IFMX conferences and training for free rather than the 1200 bucks I noticed most recently. But probably they aren't that smart. The conferences make money, and I doubt that they will notice that they need more IFMX developers. (P.S. My current clients team has been trying to hire an IFMX programmer for 6 months. Can't do it. Tell me how they are going to expand when there are no people to do the jobs. That is the problem that needs to be solved.) Look at it another way: If no innovative marketing attempt can shoehorn you into NT and the rest of the small computer marketplace, your name had better be Oracle or MSFT, or you are dead, dead, dead. This should be completely obvious. Have a nice day. Chaz