marketing question..please help

[Thomas Henkel]

RE: marketing question..please help

Richard,
You and I have spoken at length about my shop. For the others on the forum, I will explain again. We are a County government organization with over 250 employees. We have alpha5 ver1.02 applications running most phases of our business. Although I actually have a degree in computer science, many of our applications were developed by non-professionals. All of our users have a runtime version on their desktop, and access our databases and applications which reside on a Dell 6300 network server. Our applications are MASSIVE. Many of our tables exceed 100,000 records. The system works exceptionally well. Alpha software can easily handle the business aspects of an organization as large as ours. If anyone has specific questions, please don't hesitate to e-mail me.

Tom Henkel

[Ed Merritt]

RE: marketing question..please help

Richard, my response is not a direct answer to your question, but rather something to ponder for the (near) future.

I've used A4 since ver2 in 1990 or so and it's been the one application that has traveled with me from machine to machine over that 11 years. It has solved many many problems. There is one problem that it can't solve and that's the rising cost of running Microsoft OSs, particulalrly in small businesses.

I was not easily swayed into thinking that a free OS like Linux stood a chance, but now, with the cost of running MS OSs, many companies large and small are taking Linux seriously. I am operating Linux at home, mostly to learn it, but I sure wish I had Alpha 5 running on it.

I'm sure this is not the first time someone has suggested this, but it's time to smell the coffee. MS is shooting itself in the foot by imposing additional fees and Linux will be the small business user's answer. I sure hope that your organization is or will seriously consider a Linux version and soon. Here's what you can call it:
"Alpha LX".

[Trimcom]

RE: marketing question..please help

Richard!

Oh, what a breath of fresh air! On two fronts actually: First, I see something coming from headquarters that seams to be pointing to the release of v5 sometime soon; second, that a marketing effort is in the works.

Listen! I really don't think you need to define the niche at all. Didn't the program always find its own niche. Besides, it is so across the board. Businesses, consultants, amatures, Dr.'s, Lawyers, schools, etc.

Now... Please read this. I was turned on to Alpha back in the days of A4v3 by an ad in the Tiger Direct catalogue (I think it was Tiger Software then). I was using a program called "Open Access" (No relationship to Microsoft), owned by a company named Software Products International (SPI). It was a very good program, but when I saw the ads in Tiger's catalogues I was turned on, joined, and never looked back.

The ads were pleasing to the eye, clear in their message, touting the ease of use yet so powerful. (Hey, doesn't that in itself say that it's not for any niche, but for everybody?)

By the way, the filemaker ads are pretty convincing (if I didn't know better, that is).

Hope I was helpful. By the way, the competition never asks the users what thaey think! Yeah! The customer input! Don't forget to tout that!

Thanks, Richard, Selwan, and crew!

TR

[Stephen Williams]

RE: marketing question..please help

O.K. Issue covered. Take this topic from the beginning and print it on the box, exactly as it is :-). It says a whole lot of truth.
1. Alpha Software has long standing happy customers.
2. Alpha Software doesn't just listen, it ASKS what users want.
3. Alpha Five works for a wide variety of purposes.
4. There are more goodies still in development.
5. It has a 'community' to support it, not just some tired techies on terminal telephony...

You get the picture.

[French]

RE: marketing question..please help

I stumbled onto Alpha Four version 2 some years back when I realized that the flat file database I was using wasn't up to a project I needed to do. I started asking computer users I knew what they knew about relational databases, and discovered they knew very little. The owner of a small, local, computer shop had been to a show where Alpha handed out trial versions that would operate on a limited number of records, and he pulled it out and let me take it home to try. There was enough there to see that:

1. It had the capabilities I needed, and
2. It was easy enough that I could actually make it do what I needed.

I've looked at a variety of other products through the years and have yet to find any other product that hits the same sweet spot on that curve. They are either easy to use but lack capability, or they're loaded with capability but I'm not going to live long enough to coax it out of them.

It would be a mistake to say that Alpha Five is easy to use without putting it in the context of other Windows database products. For folks accustomed to keeping data in a spreadsheet, (heck, even for folks moving up to A5 from A4) there is a definite learning curve. Perhaps the addition of a tutorial (A4 even came with a tutorial audio cassette) or something would help.

[Tom Scholis]

RE: marketing question..please help

At a lot of small companies, the people who get the mail first are in accounting because they are looking for checks or they are administrators. Your direct mail program may miss this market. There are lots of accounting programs out there, but without the ability to routinely make A5 data work with accounting you can not appeal to the money people or those who open the mail. Someone commented that it would be nice to see sample apps again. I agree except that the quality of the apps should really be exceptional or they don't complement an exception product. The one app that Access users have always been willing to pay extra for in DB Magazine, for example, is accounting (at least integrated AP,AR, and GL). Sell the app as an add-on if you must, but build it and they will come.

[Pat Bremkamp]

RE: marketing question..please help

One more thought...

The sample apps that are automatically installed are great starting places, but they would be a great dfeal more helpful if the field names, sizes and types were the same from ap to ap. For example, I wanted to combine features of the contact manager, the mailing list manager and the students/classes example. Each one was different!

A little cleaning up would make them a much better starting place for newbees.

[martinwcole]

RE: marketing question..please help

Richard, I think we talked about this once, but I personally think a critical marketing issue is having Alpha show up when people are on the web and search for "data base", "data", "relational", "relational database", "programming", "custom programming", "programming language" etc. I looked for two years before I found a database that I was interested in. And I think it was almost a miracle I even found Alpha. It was on the 730th day of the two years, and on the 333rd search on the web for "data base" that I found it.

I'm not "web page maker" savvy, but I think it has to do with paying to have your name come up with different search engines - AT THE TOP!!!

hope this helps

[Stephen Williams]

RE: marketing question..please help

Used Yahoo search on "database"...

2nd choice was Computers and Internet databases, after movies and entertainment.

Click the 2nd choice got some banners and guff before

Site Listings

4th Dimension 6.0 (1)
Alpha Five 3 Professional Edition - Computer Shopper

[whanigsberg]

RE: marketing question..please help

Richard and everyone else,

I've held back to read the many insightful submissions on this issue. I believe I have one to add.

Tell managers that Alpha5 while help them get more out of their employees. In other words it improves organizational productivity.

I work in a place with about 800 employees. We have a fully professional MIS department but they are taken up (and would still be were they twice as big) in developing and maintaining big formal organizational systems. For example, we register our 10,000 students online using software we developed ourselves.

But a few people like myself have filled in the cracks. I developed a departmental scheduling system (a big deal around here) and a few other smaller applications.

Another person used filemaker to put our plant and facilities work orders off paper and on to the network. Ditto for tech support help desk management.

If you could convey to managers that the product will empower their employees in this way, you might be able to convince them to use a non-microsoft product. For sure, Access will not be able to similarly leverage the productivity of their non-specialist employees.

That's my two cents worth.

Bill