OS X Educational Shareware Market?

[Richard MacLemale]

I used to program educational shareware, about 5 years ago, and I'm
wondering if it might be time to hop back into the Macintosh educational
shareware market, and I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on that.

I think that, with many schools doing Mac OS X migration, there's a whole
market of educational users looking for elementary level OS X applications
that are NATIVE OS X and don't require Classic.  Speaking for my own county
I know this is true.  There are titles available for OS X at the elementary
level, but nowhere NEAR as many as were available in the OS 7 and OS 8 days.

It's certainly easy to get out on the Internet.  But there's three huge
problems with shareware on the net today:

1.  Piracy, and piracy of registration codes.  (I found my old program Mr.
Fixitup's registration code on 12 different websites, and the program hasn't
been sold in 5 years!)

2.  Competition from free online Flash games and activities.

3.  Consumer apathy about paying for shareware.  Seriously, there's still
plenty of people who are wondering where Napster went because they don't
understand why it was ILLEGAL.

But there's a serious excitement over OS X in schools, and elementary
schools are just now in the process of thinking about making the move.  The
number of elementary schools that run OS X is increasing and it will keep
going up for probably the next 5 years as schools slowly switch over.  So
I'm wondering if anyone might be willing to share their thoughts about the
OS X educational software market?

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