more on The software industry is learning from the RIAA?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dan Bricklin <danb () bricklin com>
Date: May 19, 2005 11:57:32 PM EDT
To: Bob Frankston <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>, 'Brett Glass'  
<brett () lariat org>, dave () farber net, 'Ip ip' <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: RE: [IP] The software industry is learning from the RIAA?


Brett,

Be careful about your history. You are thinking of VisiOn. Those of  
us at Software Arts (Bob, me, and many others), were not involved in  
VisiOn, which was written by developers at our publisher, VisiCorp.  
VisiOn, for its day, as I recall, was fast (on an 8088, but better on  
an 8086...) and the resolution was high for a PC (full res of the  
graphics cards of the day). It had lots of other problems which I  
won't go into, but it did goad Microsoft into doing Windows, which  
took them forever (and they got to wait for much more capable  
hardware). The high prices, as I recall, were for the apps, which  
were not bundled, and were set around like the prices of 1-2-3,  
Wordstar, dBase II, etc.

VisiCalc (the product Bob and I did) came out at about $100 (later  
raised to over $200) -- a steal compared to the $5,000/month you'd  
pay for timesharing financial forecasting, and had a great, zippy,  
character-based UI that lasted for many years.

People frequently get our companies confused. It's not fair to the  
developers of VisiOn (who worked quite hard on it) to assign it to us  
who get enough credit for doing VisiCalc (which those developers did  
not do), nor is it fair to us who did lots of good other stuff to  
remember us for the failed product of the company that sued us as  
they were releasing their competing spreadsheet on VisiOn.

-DanB

At 11:26 PM Thursday 5/19/2005, Bob Frankston wrote:

> I never worked at VisiCorp -- they were just the marketing company. We
> under-priced the prouct and it wasn't a GUI.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brett Glass [mailto:brett () lariat org]
> Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 12:21
> To: dave () farber net; Ip ip
> Cc: Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com
> Subject: Re: [IP] The software industry is learning from the RIAA?
>
> This comment is especially noteworthy because it comes from a
> charter employee of Visicorp, which as I recall placed a quite
> high price tag on its halting, low resolution GUI -- pricing
> that product out of the market. ;-)
>
> --Brett Glass
>
> At 07:33 AM 5/19/2005, David Farber wrote:
>
>
>
> >Begin forwarded message:
> >
> >From: Bob Frankston <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
> >Date: May 19, 2005 8:10:31 AM EDT
> >To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> >Subject: The software industry is learning from the RIAA?
> >
> >
> >Pirated is not the same as lost sales! But maybe we really do
> >want to encourage Asia to have large native software industry to
> >compete with us by pricing ourselves out of the market. Its one
> >thing to complain about unauthorized copies but another thing to say
> >that all copies are lost sales.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >http://asia.cnet.com/news/software/0,39037051,39230772,00.htm
> >
> >
> >
> >Software industry continues to lose billions to piracy
> >By Eileen Yu, CNETAsia
> >Thursday, May 19 2005 5:46 PM
> >
> >SINGAPORE--Software piracy rates may have come down, but revenue
> >losses continue to climb, according to a recent study released by the
> >Business Software Alliance.
> >
> >Piracy continues to be a major challenge for the global software
> >market, said Jeffrey J. Hardee, Asia-Pacific vice president and
> >regional director, Business Software Alliance (BSA), an international
> >non-profit body dedicated to promoting a "legal digital world".
> >
> >.
> >
> >
> >
> >Bob Frankston http://www.frankston.com
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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