jabusch@uiucdcsb.Uiuc.ARPA (08/15/85)
In Infoworld's last issue was an article on the unfortunate death of Andrew Fleugelman, the author of PC-Talk. I do not wish to discuss his death, which was quite untimely. I merely wish to point out that he had two people working full time just processing checks that arrived in the mail from people who purchased or registered his software. In case any of you are unfamiliar with PC-Talk, it's a "Freeware" communications package that was written in Basic and is generally rated in the same cate- gory as Crosstalk and Smartcom. It has a recommended $35 price tag. Now, assume that a person can clear and enter a check into the books in 6 minutes, being generous. That means that two people can clear 20 checks per hour, 240 checks per day, at least 12000 checks per year. That equals over $400,000 per year! And that figure was very, very conservative. In the front of Bob Wallace's printed manual for PC-Write, there are figures claiming well over 1000 copies registered, I don't have my manual to refer to at the moment, but that is good for rough figures. Registration is the $75 total purchase price, according to his manual. That means well over $75,000 he has made in returns. Plus, he has sold a much larger amount of disks, which cost $10. It seems to be paying off for him rather well, if you ask me. By the way, you can only get telephone support from him if you are a registered user, and you get a number when you register. Also, his phones are busy and you actually have to be called back by his technical support staff. How could this happen if he was losing money on the deal? I have noticed another thing with his package. People that I know don't usually buy the first one they get. They even- tually decide they would like a newer version with more bells, etc. and then break down and buy it. Of course, most of the people that I know are students and have very little money until they get out of school. Nevertheless, he profits from them in the long run, if just because they in turn pass the program on to someone else who will buy it. John Jabusch