METACARD ACQUIRED BY RUN REV!!!

[Richard MacLemale]

> Let's be realistic. If RunRev own the engine they can afford to wait until
> you need a new Rev feature or some new feature of Panther breaks your apps.
> 
> Monte

MetaCard 2.5 runs awesome under Panther.  :)   Heh heh heh...

I feel that the odds of me, and some other MC developers, being Rev
customers increase greatly if they cross grade us now without the fee.  It's
not like it's never been done before... Emagic did it.  They said that they
were no longer going to make the Windows version of Logic, and so they
offered a cross-grade to the Mac version for free.  OK, so that may or may
not have brought some extra folks to the Mac platform, and Apple owns
Emagic, but still the point stands.  They were making a switch and they
wanted to bring as many of their users along as possible.  RunRev would
certainly like to have all of the MetaCard developers convert to Revolution,
but we have to basically do the equivalent of buying their small business
edition to make the change.  So unless you need direct e-mail support and a
lot of extra database stuff, it's really not a huge bargain.

I think that there will be plenty of MetaCard users who will not upgrade
right now to Rev... They'll wait around and see what future versions of Rev
bring, and then maybe they'll upgrade and maybe they won't, depending on
what fancy new features Rev adds.  And in the meantime they will continue to
use MetaCard.  Let's face it, if we thought Rev was better we would have
already jumped over.

And we don't KNOW what we're missing.  We don't know how fast RunRev
responds to bugs, or how fast they respond to complaints, or how willing
they are to listen to user input.  People who use Rev give the company high
marks in those areas, but those of us who still use MetaCard have not
experienced that first hand so we don't "know" it.  If we switched to Rev
right now, and had a chance to experience being a Rev user first hand, we
might become enamored with the experience and the community and it might
make us more likely to renew and give them money.  Which is a valid point...
I think that I, and maybe some other folks, would be more likely to update
Rev in the future if I could migrate without getting charged right now, as
opposed to not using the product at all.

Like I said, it's a calculated gamble.  RunRev is gambling that MetaCard
users will pay to upgrade MetaCard and then migrate, and they realize that
they're going to lose some folks (like me) at least temporarily, and maybe
forever, but they're willing to take that risk.  They hope that at some
point in time in the future we'll decide we want to buy in, and they'll take
the money then.  But let's not jump to the conclusion that the next version
of the Mac OS will break MetaCard.  There's a decent chance that MetaCard
2.5 will run on the Mac OS for another 5 years without breaking.  You never
know.  Maybe even longer.  RunRev could have pretty much every single
MetaCard developer if it wanted them right now, by offering a free
cross-grade.  Instead, MetaCard/RunRev is going for another $300 to make it
happen.  They're going to make some money and they're going to lose some
people.  And some people they lose will come back, and some won't.  In the
long run, which way is better for them?  I don't know.

-- 
:)
Richard MacLemale
Network Administrator
J. W. Mitchell High School