Re: The Business End of Alpha Software for independent developers
Hi Eric.
Point is, something will not become the future just because Alpha says it will. There is no doubt in my mind that mobile devices will play an important role in the future. The question however is, WHO's future?? You can't manoeuvre "the future" in a place where your needs are. History has shown, that companies often are a very bad judge to predict the route future will take. I bring text-messaging into mind. Who would have believed it would become that big? Look at the smart phone. It almost cost market-leader Nokia its life when they did not soon enough react to a changing market and thought it would only be minor. This can however go both ways. So I agree with Eric that changing to market conditions is vital for any market but bring to the table that it is often hard to decipher the way the market is going, and when you change not exactly in the right moment or to the right extend or direction, chances are you will take the wrong route and end somewhere else as where "the future" will be. Examples of that you can write books off.
Mobile will never replace the desktop. It will be an addition to it at best. Something new, that will fulfill new roles in business or replace less optimized existing solutions. As you pointed out, it makes no sense to replace the desktop with a mobile device to write a Word document for your business. So that is not about to happen. With regards to any new role this will be in the area of mobile officers like sales representatives or other employees that work in the field. That however will still be a minority of the employees of which most are still living and functioning in office buildings where the desktop rules and will rule in the future.
That has been the market with which Alpha grew up, and it will always be an important market for Alpha in the future. Whether they will still service that market in the future is obviously Alpha's decision and not ours. The mobile market will be an important addition to the group of functions that Alpha needs to cover to be taken seriously in the future. When it limits it's product to that section however, it will doubtlessly suffer from that consequence. I doubt that this will be the case, and there are enough statements already from Selwyn where he says the desktop will be served in the future as well. The most important danger I see with this whole development is, that the desktop will still be serviced, but only with minor resources as a consequence of which the future desktop product could prove to be not much improved or it's enhancement comes to a dead-stop. Should this happen, then customers who have strong interests in the desktop product will possibly abandon ship. Alpha is only a small company, and it has limited resources. Working on Mobile doubtlessly means working less on other sections. That will cause friction, since the market has not come to a dead-stop and is still moving on and asking for improvements that do not come. Looking at v9 to v11 the realized desktop changes do not appear as "high impact ones" to me I must say. But that could just and only be me.
Even if Alpha will produce the best possible mobile device development environment in the future, it still is no guarantee that the market will adopt this. Anybody who does not live in Wonderland knows that. Take for example the 8-track system. Technically advanced delivering audio over 8 tracks it was vastly superior to the audio-cassette. Nevertheless it lost from that very same audio-cassette. Alpha needs to battle Microsoft's marketing budgets in order to win the fight for the customer, and that is almost impossible to do. I can not find any other reason as to why Alpha Five still has a smaller market share then Microsoft's Access product. It is vastly superior to Access, there have been many tests and reviews proving that, nonetheless this did not change the market situation for a bit: look at post #73. How clear do you want to have it? The big players have a huge grip on the development market and are not giving in to someone small. If you want market ground, you need to fight them every inch of the market you want to get, and defend it at once. Now, the past history is no guarantee for the future as we know, but in the past Alpha has unfortunately not succeeded in taking ground from Access in the professional market as post #73 shows clearly and we as professionals all knew already.
Stick to what you know best. Keep improving. Many entrepreneurs who succeeded in one field of business changed to a completely different thing and most of the time only to find out that success in one field is no guarantee for an other field.
Below is a graph that shows the development in number of threads on the Alpha forum between Desktop and Webapp. Note, that v11 has started only shortly.
Threads.jpg
Hi Eric.
Point is, something will not become the future just because Alpha says it will. There is no doubt in my mind that mobile devices will play an important role in the future. The question however is, WHO's future?? You can't manoeuvre "the future" in a place where your needs are. History has shown, that companies often are a very bad judge to predict the route future will take. I bring text-messaging into mind. Who would have believed it would become that big? Look at the smart phone. It almost cost market-leader Nokia its life when they did not soon enough react to a changing market and thought it would only be minor. This can however go both ways. So I agree with Eric that changing to market conditions is vital for any market but bring to the table that it is often hard to decipher the way the market is going, and when you change not exactly in the right moment or to the right extend or direction, chances are you will take the wrong route and end somewhere else as where "the future" will be. Examples of that you can write books off.
Mobile will never replace the desktop. It will be an addition to it at best. Something new, that will fulfill new roles in business or replace less optimized existing solutions. As you pointed out, it makes no sense to replace the desktop with a mobile device to write a Word document for your business. So that is not about to happen. With regards to any new role this will be in the area of mobile officers like sales representatives or other employees that work in the field. That however will still be a minority of the employees of which most are still living and functioning in office buildings where the desktop rules and will rule in the future.
That has been the market with which Alpha grew up, and it will always be an important market for Alpha in the future. Whether they will still service that market in the future is obviously Alpha's decision and not ours. The mobile market will be an important addition to the group of functions that Alpha needs to cover to be taken seriously in the future. When it limits it's product to that section however, it will doubtlessly suffer from that consequence. I doubt that this will be the case, and there are enough statements already from Selwyn where he says the desktop will be served in the future as well. The most important danger I see with this whole development is, that the desktop will still be serviced, but only with minor resources as a consequence of which the future desktop product could prove to be not much improved or it's enhancement comes to a dead-stop. Should this happen, then customers who have strong interests in the desktop product will possibly abandon ship. Alpha is only a small company, and it has limited resources. Working on Mobile doubtlessly means working less on other sections. That will cause friction, since the market has not come to a dead-stop and is still moving on and asking for improvements that do not come. Looking at v9 to v11 the realized desktop changes do not appear as "high impact ones" to me I must say. But that could just and only be me.
Even if Alpha will produce the best possible mobile device development environment in the future, it still is no guarantee that the market will adopt this. Anybody who does not live in Wonderland knows that. Take for example the 8-track system. Technically advanced delivering audio over 8 tracks it was vastly superior to the audio-cassette. Nevertheless it lost from that very same audio-cassette. Alpha needs to battle Microsoft's marketing budgets in order to win the fight for the customer, and that is almost impossible to do. I can not find any other reason as to why Alpha Five still has a smaller market share then Microsoft's Access product. It is vastly superior to Access, there have been many tests and reviews proving that, nonetheless this did not change the market situation for a bit: look at post #73. How clear do you want to have it? The big players have a huge grip on the development market and are not giving in to someone small. If you want market ground, you need to fight them every inch of the market you want to get, and defend it at once. Now, the past history is no guarantee for the future as we know, but in the past Alpha has unfortunately not succeeded in taking ground from Access in the professional market as post #73 shows clearly and we as professionals all knew already.
Stick to what you know best. Keep improving. Many entrepreneurs who succeeded in one field of business changed to a completely different thing and most of the time only to find out that success in one field is no guarantee for an other field.
Below is a graph that shows the development in number of threads on the Alpha forum between Desktop and Webapp. Note, that v11 has started only shortly.
Threads.jpg
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