BILLW@SU-SCORE.ARPA (William Chops Westfield) (08/19/85)
People are missing some points. Shareware is fundamentally cheaper than published software written by individuals. It is probably fundamentally cheaper than software written by companies like Microsoft or Borland. Anyone can write a program and make it shareware, and perhaps make money, but it is a royal pain to try to get some program you have written sold through a publisher. Why? Well, for the first point, shareware has no advertising to pay for - it sort of lives or dies by word of mouth and bboard. There is very little cost incurred in support or packaging, or documentation, or anything. Of course, if your program becomes really successful like PCTALK or PCWRITE, then perhaps you'll have to spend some money and hire people to open the envelopes, send out the latest versions, make pretty documentation, keep the IRS happy, and so on. But this is for people that have already sent you their money. This is the big difference between Shareware and published programs - you doesn't have to start spending money until AFTER there is income from the program. On the other hand, if you publish a program through some publisher, in order to get $35 per copy of the program sold, the program must sell for about $200 retail. the publisher gets a cut for advertising support, manufacturing, and distribution, the distributor gets a cut for support and distribution, and the retailer gets a cut for shelf space, support, and sort of "I recommend ChopsTalk as a communications program" type advertising. They all incur their costs BEFORE the program ever sells a single copy, so it's difficult to get publishers to look at your program unless it looks like a sure seller. Borland and co are an interesting case. By having the same company be the author and the publisher (and one of the distributors), they can sell programs for a lot less than publishers who sell an authors program through the maze discussed above. Still, they made it big, and things aren't quite working out right. Borland now has 2 page color adds in Byte and such, better support, fancier packaging and documentation, and so on. Their costs are going up, and so is the price of their software. The original Turbo Pascal cost about $30, but the latest version is three times that. Turbo is generally considered to still be worth every penny, but the trend make you wonder whether this sort of system can actually work in the long run. Shareware is really easy. If you take a program you have already written, you put a notice in it that says "This is shareware, please send me money". After that, you can treat it as if you were releasing it for truly free distribution, put it on bboards, post it to the net, and so on. If someone sends you money, great. If not, you are no worse off that if you just made the software public domain. If I ever release microcomputer software again, it will probably be as shareware. (Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much interest in a rewritten version of MSXHP150.ASM (the terminal emulator for the HP150 version of KERMIT) that redefines the keyboard driver so as to send EMACS escape sequences on touch screen activation, which is the kind of thing I tend to write :-) Comments welcome. Bill Westfield -------