Vitaliy wrote:
> People who need a justification for the failure of their software
> love this argument (it is only second to the "failure of the market"
> excuse).

I agree there are far too many people griping about Microsoft just because
they are a success.  That doesn't excuse some of the business practises of
Microsoft though.

>> From my experience -- if you have a good product, it tends to sell
>> itself.
> If you have a product that people don't want (no matter how
> technologically sophisticated it is), you can spend boatloads of
> money on marketing and still not even recoup the development costs.

My observation is that once a product is "good enough", the rest is up to
marketing, distribution channels, etc.  Marketing can't compensate for a
outright crappy product when there are better alternatives for a reasonable
price, but it seems that being somewhat better than good enough doesn't get
you very far except in niche markets.

It is possible to eventually build up a reputation of superior quality and
then you can get away with charging more for it, but it takes a long time
and lots of effort to get there.  Think of HP up to the mid 1980s.  Even
then, others had higher volumes.


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