Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:wt0gh.5709$Gr2.1240@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I've worked for almost five years now for almost nothing (average of less
> than $10K a year, while spending over $40K of my own money, which was all
I
> had, and another $40K of Mark's money.) It will probably be another four
> before I could even begin to consider buying a house so that I could even
> have a mortage to pay, and moving out of this tiny, one bedroom apartment
> and stop having to work 7x12x365. So I find your statements a little
> insulting, as if you somehow think we are doing this so that we can buy a
> second summer home or something.

I hope this isn't taken the wrong way, but the way it usually works is that
if you're good enough, eventually one of the big boys will either buy your
company or steal your product and use their enormous corporate treasure
chest to give away enough of their product to eventually capture meaningful
market share.  If you're not good enough, you'll keep doing what you're
doing until you burn out and then you'll get a day job!  (-:

The problem is you have to have a *lot* of users to support the true cost of
programming (your efforts).  Raise the price to more equitably compensate
yourself and a lot of people who might have taken a look at $450 would think
a long time about spending twice that.  I don't know where the magic price
point is, but I've seen custom programs for several very different
industries, priced in the $1-3K, eventually sputter and fail because they
had just enough users to make every incompatibility unique, but not enough
to gain any economies of scale for all the troubleshooting time.  The
enviroment is also getting more and more complicated with so many versions
of Windows to support.  IIRC, each one of those failed companies died
shortly after a major new OS was introduced.  A specialized program like
yours takes all the incompatibility hits, deserved or not, and you end up
troubleshooting a lot of problems that aren't yours.

--
Bobby G.