Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:p5adnVJmgqteah3YnZ2dnUVZ_v-tnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx

> 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

We are primarily targeting the professional market. In that market, our
product is quite competitive price-wise, though the benefits tend to only
kick in once you get the system up out of the very small sized system. The
reason being that we can't scale our product down really low price-wise, but
you can scale it up for a very reasonable cost due to the very high power of
very reasonably priced hardware these days.

> 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.
>

In this we are actually in a very good position. We use very few system
services. We have now over 700,000 lines of proprietary code and we do as
much as possible ourselves. This is why if you read our forum we have very
little of the stuff you see on many fora, where people complain that they
installed something and the product stopped working. Of the couple of high
level features we use, a media player wrapper is one, and we had a little
growing pains with that initial implementation. But mostly we just aren't
too troubled with this kind of thing. We'll certainly have to do a little
tweaking for Vista, due to their changed security implementation, but it
shouldn't be a huge deal. The product currently runs on XP, XP Home, W2K
Server, and W3K Server unchanged.

We have a couple of 'virtual kernel' modules and all system services are
encapsulated inside them (a core one, a windowing one, and a couple for some
specialized bits like ODBC.) Everything else is completely built on top of
that virtual kernel, and not even any system or language runtime headers are
visible outside of them. This provides us with a lot of flexibility to deal
with changes in the OS.

---------------------
Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd
www.charmedquark.com