mailnews@allegra.UUCP (Henry Kautz's mailnews program) (02/07/88)
There have been a few very big shareware successes. A friend of mine, David Whitman, wrote CHASM, an assembler for the IBM pc, and distributed it as shareware, the year after the pc first came out. Since then he's averaged about $300 a month in donations (go figure it out). The reasons for success? 1. It was cost effective. A $35 or so donation vs. $200 for the Microsoft assembler. 2. It could ride on the coattails of a successful product. It never has had as many bells and whistles as the Microsoft product, but it was much easier to use to produce small assembly-language routines callable from Turbo Pascal. 3. It was well documented. Dave wrote a tutorial, assuming total ignorance on the part of the user. The commercial products were all aimed at professional programmers. 4. It was continuously updated, and registered users got the updates and notifications. CHASM went from being an interpreted Basic program to a compiled version with macro facility, etc. 5. It met a real market need, and was early into that marketplace. If your program meets all these criteria, then it may well succeed as shareware. I doubt that *any* shareware product has succeeded that has not met *all* these criteria.