Re: Selling Matlab and Mathematica addons

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:29:06 +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:

Mathematica's graphics have been backward for many years. I've had
hardware accelerated graphics for almost a decade and the latest
Mathematica (5.2) still cannot make any use of it.

I believe most CASs are in this situation, except for visualization
add-ons.

Personal opinion.

perhaps forgetting that users of such systems, on the whole, are less
awed by eye candy than your average Windows user.

Half of the reason I used Mathematica was because it could generate good
for-print graphics from code.

Personal inclination.

Since
they are a much smaller crowd anyway, it stands to reason that eye
candy add-ons for CAS are not likely to be best sellers.

Maybe. We've published a mathematical add-on for time-frequency and
presentation software. The time-frequency package sold 40x as well but I
still think there is a market for eye-candy add-ons.

Personal opinion.

It would seem that you are trying to sell what you yourself like.
The fact that, by your own admission, you are not succeeding all that
well seems to imply that maybe that you are out of sync with your target
customers, or that your stuff is more expensive than it is worth: We all
like eye candy, but a reasonable price.

Also, if you regardless persist on that route, you might consider using
non-proprietary tools that works on other platforms, besides MS Windows
- chances are that the percentage of non-Windows users of CAS is
significantly higher than its general counterpart.

Windows accounts for over half of Mathematica sales. Also .NET makes
application programming much easier than anything I know of under Linux.

Well, here is your answer. If you can develop something that does
not depend on .NET and works under, say, Linux and Mac, besides MS
Windows, you might try and see whether a large chunk of the half you are
currently ignoring is more receptive than the MS Windows half.

As for the difficulty - you seem to have a Ph.D., which would
imply that you can learn better and more complicated things than the non-
Ph.D. population.



.

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