Few products have gotten off to such an intense start.  We're getting a lot of email from users who want DesktopX Pro but can't afford $499.

Their uses vary but boil down to this:

1) Being able to use for internal apps

2) Sending a "gadget" to a friend or family4 member.

3) Making widgets for personal use where they just want to run something they make on their various home machines and not worry whether they have DesktopX on all of them or not.

These are 3 types of people that we are not currently targeting with DesktopX Pro.

But what if we did this:

Have DesktopX Pro be $129 instead and put into the license that programs created with it may not be sold or used for marketing purposes?

So when you click to get DesktopX Pro, you would be presented with two options:

a) I will not be selling applications created with DesktopX Pro or using them for marketing purposes: $129

I will be using DesktopX Pro for commercial development: $499

The question is, would $129 still be "too high" for power users? Much less than $129 and it's really not worth it and gets too close to the Object Desktop price.

What do you think?

Few products have gotten off to such an intense start.  We're getting a lot of email from users who want DesktopX Pro but can't afford $499.

Their uses vary but boil down to this:

1) Being able to use for internal apps

2) Sending a "gadget" to a friend or family4 member.

3) Making widgets for personal use where they just want to run something they make on their various home machines and not worry whether they have DesktopX on all of them or not.

These are 3 types of people that we are not currently targeting with DesktopX Pro.

But what if we did this:

Have DesktopX Pro be $129 instead and put into the license that programs created with it may not be sold or used for marketing purposes?

So when you click to get DesktopX Pro, you would be presented with two options:

a) I will not be selling applications created with DesktopX Pro or using them for marketing purposes: $129

I will be using DesktopX Pro for commercial development: $499

The question is, would $129 still be "too high" for power users? Much less than $129 and it's really not worth it and gets too close to the Object Desktop price.

So now that Panther (MacOS X 10.3) is out the Mac users are out again trying to convince "pee-cee" users to "Switch". The problem is, Mac advocates have no credibility at this point. They've spent it long ago. People don't like being lied to and the most vocal of Mac fanatics regularly and massively crossed the line between exuberance and outright dishonesty.

Anyone who has debated in the OS wars long enough has seen what I'm talking about. Over the years argued that things like pre-emptive multitasking, SMP, multi-threading, memory protection, etc. were either things they didn't need or more ridiculously, bad things that they were better off not having.

Then, once MacOS X came out and finally brought Mac users into the 90s (Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 had all of he above and OS/2 2.0 in 1992 had all but SMP) Mac users not only began chanting the importance of these things but occasionally would even claim that they were exclusive to MacOS X. That Windows didn't have it.  Even Windows 95 had multithreading and some memory protection for crying out loud.

Today I read a Mac advocate claiming that Windows, even today, doesn't support SMP.  Windows XP Pro, Windows 2000, and Windows NT before it all supported SMP.  I also read one claiming that Windows programs aren't multithreaded and that was just another reason to switch to MacOS X.

But that wasn't the claim that sparked me to write this article.  I read a Mac user finally admit that MacOS X 10.2 "Jaguar" was "kind of beta quality".  No DUH.  After all the flames I got for my iMac experience review in which all my claims were trivialized by various Mac "advocates" who referred to me on public forums as an "idiot" for someone to finally fess up that hey, yea, Jaguar was actually kind of crappy in various corners.  And bear in mind, Jaguar was the first useable version of MacOS X in my opinion. Before that, MacOS X was so slow as to be unusable by anyone who actually needs to get work done (don't send letters about how you used 10.0 just fine, I'm about as interested in that as I am from hearing from OS/2 users today saying how OS/2 Warp 4.x is as good as Windows XP).

MacOS X 10.3 (Panther) is actually good. Very good in fact. It is what MacOS X should have been. But after all the..sorry LIES that the Mac community spread about previous versions, now that they actually have the goods, who's going to believe them? How can anyone take seriously someone who claimed that MacOS X (10.0 / 10.1) was better than Windows 2000 or Windows XP? Give me a break. And remember there were web articles that seriously tried to "compare" MacOS X 10.0 and 10.1 to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.  Remember how they always showed MacOS X 10.1 being better? Right... Not even close.

Ironically, Panther is that good. I must say that I could see how people would prefer Panther to Windows XP.  I still find it a big sluggish, and I don't like not being able to MAXIMIZE programs to use the whole screen easily (maybe there's a keyboard commend that does that). But it really is a solid operating system now. But Mac users can't, IMO, be trusted on their verdicts. Their biases go way beyond being helpful into being damaging to the Mac movement.  Windows users generally just don't care if you use Windows or not. So it's generally easier to find more balanced reporting on it. I have no particular love for Windows. But the alternatives haven't been promising both as a user and as a software developer. 

It will be interesting to see how things go with MacOS X now that it has finally delivered the goods. Pity though that the Mad advocates blew their wad before the OS was ready for prime time. Because it's now when credibility on their part would make a big difference.

https://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=1312

Based on some of the reaction by some users to how "expensive" DesktopX Pro costs, I wrote a little article that talks about why DesktopX Pro costs what it costs and compares it to other "Real" products out there.

So today we released a new product called DesktopX Professional. It's $499 and what it does is allow you to create relatively small applications incredibly quickly.

Creating software has a significant overhead attached to it. If you wanted to, for example, to create this clock here with say Visual Studio.net how long would it take you to write it? Well, writing something that tells the time wouldn't be hard. But about the actual clock? As you can see, it has a shadow under it, the edges are perfectly alpha blended, the clock hands are also alpha blended. And of course there's the artwork of the clock itself.

Creating something like this would not be trivial. It could not be done in a day. A good developer might be able to make it in a week or two. A typical developer would take several weeks and then it would only work on Windows 2000 or Windows XP since they would have to use layered windows to do the alpha blending. How long would it take, for instance, to make it so that the object was desktop level? That is, didn't go on top of your programs? That would take even longer. It could be done for sure, but it would take some effort. And after that time, you would have a clock. With DesktopX Pro, it can be done in less than 5 minutes. And the resulting program is a single 600k program. No DLLs, no runtimes.

In fact, here it is:

Elegant Analog Clock This simple analog clock adds polish to your desktop

[Download]

Most of the software our company makes is relatively "inexpensive". In fact, some software developers have accused us of "predatory pricing" over the years. Object Desktop is $50 and includes over a dozen programs. DesktopX standard is only $20 and it has built in NT based desktop security, a feature that is probably worth $150 by itself if you talk to IT managers.

Our pricing has, over the years, hurt us in corporate sales because it's so inexpensive that companies have thought it must just be a "toy". If there are any software developers reading this you are free to laugh at us for our stupidity:

DesktopX, the $20 version of it, allows you to embed ActiveX controls (ANY ActiveX control) right onto your desktop. That means, for $20 you could build your own custom web browser into the desktop and create a corporate kiosk. Then you could enable the desktop security features so that no one could mess with it. That ActiveX control could play a repeating .WMV file all day. In short, for $20 you have a corporate kiosk without requiring any additional software.  We must sell tons of copies of DesktopX to those who make kiosks right? Nope. Because $20 makes companies think there must be some huge gotcha.  Our goal was to try to sell DesktopX standard in quantity but in reality there just isn't a "mass" need for kiosks. So we sell DesktopX to end users and corporations alike in relatively low volumes.

Ironically, our $9,500 priced DirectSkin has become something of a standard in the custom GUI development market. It has the ability to turn a standard Windows program into a fully skinned one with only a few lines of code.  Smart IT managers are able to make that calculation in a nano-second -- $9,500 to wave a magic wand and make their plain old Windows app into something that has a cool skinned UI? It's a no brainer. 

Ironically, some of our own customers seem blissfully unaware of a) how good of a deal Object Desktop is at $50 or how much other software products cost.  I wasn't aware of this until we announced DesktopX Professional ($499) on WinCustomize and immediately got responses showing a near outrage at the price.

Think about that. $499 for a product that can let you turn out stand alone applications that are fully customized and can do virtually anything you want them to do.  Want to make your own personal virtual desktop manager? 5 minutes. How about a corporate messenger? 5 minutes. How about those companies that develop those nifty desktop gadgets you see? My kid downloaded a Finding Nemo toy from Disney.com which had the characters swimming across the desktop. Wonder how long that took to write? I bet you it took exponentially longer to do than it would have taken to do with DesktopX Pro.  $499. No brainer.

But DesktopX Pro isn't just cheap considering what it does. It's cheap compared to other software products out there. Let's take a journey to the scary world in which Photoshop is purchased rather than downloaded from some warez site.  A land where Shockwave sites are generated and Flash movies designed.  A place where documents are generated and not just read.  We call it...the real world:

Okay okay you say, but these are targeting specific groups (which DesktopX Pro is too btw). What about something a lot of users would make use of?

Okay, how about Adobe Acrobat? All it does is take a document and...um...well...turns it into a document. It's $99. It's popular enough that most people have Acrobat Reader on their machines. 

The point being, once you move away from software that is largely for personal use, enjoyment, it gets "expensive" in a hurry. Terms like "Return on Investment" become the selling point rather than "Hey, that's neat."  And if they think DesktopX Pro is expensive, I won't even talk about DesktopX Enterprise (>$10,000).

Check out DesktopX Pro (cool little programs available for download if nothing else) here: http://www.desktopx.net/pro.asp

When I first got my iMac I confess to having been quite disappointed. For one thing, MacOS X Jaguar was kind of crummy in my opinion. Mac users tend to be a fanatical lot and as a result tend to live in denial about the short comings of the Mac. It's like they have this unspoken rule not to publicly speak about all the problems Mac users deal with.

Not being part of that cult, I had the audacity to point out the short comings here on JoeUser (will put together a list of links shortly to those blogs). The response was predictable - massive flammage and denials.

I have two basic problems with 10.2 that, as I researched, turned out to be pretty common:

1) Printing. It was ridiculously complicated to get printing to work if it wasn't physically on the machine. And even the printer control wasn't part of the preferences which I thought was ridiculous. I had to go into "utilities" (a folder on the hard drive) to even attempt to set up a printer.

2) Networking. Networking just didn't work very well in a mixed environment for me. I eventually brought the iMac to work and was in the ridiculous situation of having to use a removable drive to move files from my PC to the Mac 4 feet away. I never could figure out why I couldn't connect to the network drives with Jaguar. It should have worked but didn't.

But Panther addresses both those issues. Printing worked both flawlessly and intuitively. Now, the printer setup is part of the preferences panel. I just typed in the IP address of my printer and off I went. No sweat. Windows networks are explicitly supported now in printing. The driver for my printer was easily found and available.

Same on network drives, it just works now. I didn't do anything differently, it simply works now. So I can access all my network stuff from the Mac which makes it much more useful.

Expose, as others have pointed out, really is remarkable. And it cannot be done on Windows at present. Not anywhere near as slickly. One would have to use layered windows like crazy to do it and it would be much slower, even on high end hardware. Apple doesn't have to worry about this feature being stolen on the PC until Longhorn comes out (at which point it'll be fair game). Apple definitely borrowed ideas from Windows too. The F11 key minimizing everhthing is akin to Ctrl-M and Ctrl-Shift-M on Windows. Fast user switching is pretty much the same as it is on Windows without the special effect.

The intelligence of Apple really comes through with Panther though. They KNOW that Windows XP doesn't have a compositer. That means it can't do fast, slick animations and changing of Windows. WindowFX (https://www.stardock.com/products/windowfx) is the closest thing on the PC for being able to do cool effects and I can tell you that it's a real pain to do even what it does let alone somethign like Expose or the fast user switching effects. I don't think Expose is a unique idea, it's something we wanted to do on OS/2 back in the 90s but being able to make fast thumbnails is just not possible. But credit has to go to Apple for actually doing it. Ideas are cheap, execution matters and Apple excuted on this idea. I will be annoyed if Apple and Mac users get all huffy WHEN Expose like features show up on Longhorn by Microsoft or third parties. Expose isn't an innovation, it is just MacOS X is the only OS capable of pulling it off (first person shooters weren't an innovation either, it was just a matter of when the hardware would make it feasible). So kudos to Apple for putting this in 10.3, it's a great feature.

The new Finder is very nice. I prefer it to the old one a lot. But even with all this praise, I still feel a little annoyed that Apple charged 10.2 users $129 for what is, essentially, a service pack and a shareware bundle (expose). Sure, it's a great deal for 9.x users but for 10.2 users, it's a major bug fix. I could live without Expose, despite its coolness. Being able to print and access the network is key but those things should have worked in 10.2

My verdict is that with MacOS X 10.3 Apple has made their OS truly ready for prime time. I'll go so far as to say that if someday Microsoft makes it too hard for us to work on Windows that MacOS would be an attractive platform to migrate to if it came to that.

So as I get into Panther (OS X 10.3) I'm increasingly annoyed at the $129 upgrade price. Not that Panther isn't a good upgrade but Apple has pretty much made it clear that it is a specialty shop. You're not just buying a computer, you are buying membership into an elite club.

But for most people, cost matters. As a Mac and Windows user, my view is that while the Mac has some nice features, it s not nearly worth the cost involved.

I mean come on, $129 for 10.3 from 10.2? That's ridiculous. 10.3 is a service pack + some nice enhancements but it's pretty hard to justify $129 for it.

To trot out the often used car analogy, MacOS is like a high end BMW convertible. It definitely has some nice perks but it's not terribly compelling for most people over say a $35,000 Lincoln or Pontiac Bonneville or SUV. Especially since it may be impractical for some day to day stuff.

 

I've written an article that shows how statistics can be used (and abused) to make business decisions.

But what you may find interesting was the choice of stats to look at for the article - the popularity of WindowBlinds skins over the years.

https://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=1248

 

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. It's true. Statistics can be used to pass off the most erroneous things as seemingly factual. Those of us who base our business plans on statistics have to be very careful not to let statistics mislead us. Over the years, I have made statistical analysis a key part of my core competency. I track all manner of statistics and have learned how to mush them together to form reasonably accurate conclusions.

Here are 4 tables.

May-01	DLs
WindOS Soft	911
MSWindowsXP	794
Nascent	703
LunaUIXP V2	570
Gemin	567

Jul-02	DLs
Midnite	1480
Serene II	1407
Industrial Disease	815
Kismet	466
Win2k Extended	403

Feb-03	DLs
XP Prime	2795
C-N Red	2027
Woodworks	1055
Axion_CCOlor	687
Vgreen	568

Nov-03	DLs
Longorn Slate	2121
Atlantek 2	1036
Flooter WB	867
NHA Thy	796
Shadow 2.0	665

So what are these tables you're thinking? These are the top 5 WindowBlinds skin downloads for a particular day in May 2001, July 2002, February 2003, and November 2003. I want to know if the overall user base of WindowBlinds is increasing or decreasing.

As anyone who does statistical analysis can tell you, if you are trying to determine the # of users, you cannot go by the top downloads. Ideally, you would use the mean number of downloads. Unfortunately, that would take too long. And I have found an imperfect mechanism for getting a "rough" user base guestimation.

Throwing out #1 and #2 from each allows us to eliminate skins that might have been highlighted somewhere or been linked by someone or had other extenuating circumstances.  Instead, places 3-5 added together will make our rough estimate but only as the start of our statistical analysis journey:

So, places 3 through 5 for each one:

May-01	1840
Jul-02	1684
Feb-03	2310
Nov-03	2328

Better but there is still a problem. Look at the months. Web site activity varies greatly by time of year. The peek months are usually October through March. The dead time is June and July.  So we have to bias thee results a bit:

Date	DLs	Fudget Factor	Modifed Result
May-01	1840	1	1840
Jul-02	1684	1.1	1852
Feb-03	2310	0.9	2079
Nov-03	2328	0.9	2095

Now we have a better idea. If you saw the original results, the tempting thing to do would be to say "Hey look, November has the highest stats ever, We're kicking ass!" But that would be a delusion, a dangerous one. November is a peek traffic month just like February is.  Whereas the earlier stats were from the Spring and Summer months.  After biasing them, the results don't look quite as impressive but they do show consistent growth.  From July 2002 the WindowBlinds population has increased by around 12%.

Of course, even here there are other issues, such as the day to day availability of skins. Turns out that on average, 1.5 new visual styles are added each day to the world of WindowBlinds. But the quality can vary from week to week. But you make due with what you got.

I've tracked most of the other programs, competitors and unrelated programs alike to look for trends. This technique definitely works well as a basic guide for popularity. Which gets back to my point -- if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to wear many hats. I attribute much of our success to knowing the market and making projections based on accurate statistical models. Those who ignore the statistics or don't know how to accurately use them are likely to end up bankrupt in the long term.

 

TURN these...

INTO these...

DesktopX Professional enables developers to export DesktopX objects as stand alone programs.

Because DesktopX has been designed to create "desktop widgets" so easily, creating software such as MP3 players, calendars, stock tickers, resource monitoring, messaging, and various "desktop gadgets" can be done in minutes rather than months.

Here is a sample of a few applications created in minutes with DesktopX

The different versions of DesktopX