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From: Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: Never see third party support????
Date: 24 May 1995 22:12:49 GMT
Organization: Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <3q0b11$8mf@park.uvsc.edu>
References: <3pssm8$58k@gold.interlog.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hecate.artisoft.com
ryan@interlog.com (David Ryan) wrote:
] Why is it that I never see very much third party applications support for
] BDSI in any of the UN*X mags. All I ever see is Solaris, SunOS, Netware
] and SCO. Specifically such things as funky X system support tools and the
] like.
Market, penetration, and density.
BSDI is a small market.
Being number one in that market would mean very little in terms
of revenue.
The density is such that even the "market leader" for a product
in the BSDI market would probably not buy back the support costs
to make it a viable revenue stream.
I know what I'd do about it if I were BSDI (or UnixWare, which
doesn't have a large penetration relative to SCO), but it would
take an investment of at least a million for the fix and probably
two for a year worth of marketing after that, not including their
employee costs on top of that.
Right now their primary market is ISP's and Web sites (for instance,
both Netscape products are available for their box). I'm not sure
if they're interested in commoditization in any case, since the
level of support they provide their current customers would be
bound to fall (another million, this time including personnel
costs, to establish a broad market support mechanism and reengineer
the top support issues out of the product).
Probably the "budge-o" approach would be your best bet, which is
IBCS2 ABI certification for existing SCO and UnixWare products;
that'd buy you a large application base right there, as long as
there was some guarantee that the apps would work as well as they
do on SCO.
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.