Piracy, Bootlegging, and Copying
** This thread discusses the article: Piracy, Bootlegging, and Copying **
You know that old, often misunderstood saying: "The customer is always right". It doesn't mean that you can count on the customers always making the right decisions. It means that whatever your potential customers decide, as a whole, must be accepted. If they've decided not to buy your product, you have to accept that reality. Bob: You may well be right. Perhaps there's no good profitable market for RPG procedure libraries. As someone pointed out in another discussion, a commercial procedure library may well save some programmer some time, but that company still has to pay for the programmer who can develop comparable functionality in-house. I still remember the debates that went on in the early 1990's regarding OS/2, and how difficult it was for a company to sell OS/2 products. This discussion sounds very similar. The bottom line is that you have to support yourself and your family. No matter how you or anyone else feels about RPG, if you can't do that with RPG tools, then no one would have any right to complain if you decided to leave the RPG software market. Clearly, you have some tough decisions to make. But I don't think leaving the iSeries world altogether has to be on the table. RPG may not be where the action is, but there's a lot of interesting potential in other aspects of the system. You have clear strengths in education and training. Perhaps you just need to add more diverse technologies to your training menu. If more and more people are doing Java, you could provide training to help people integrate RPG and Java code? Or help people integrate RPG into the LAMP stack? (I think I suggested elsewhere that this approach might be the best way to keep RPG alive.) Anyways, I don't mean to tell you how to run your business. But perhaps you need to be a bit more pragmatic and temper your "RPG über Alles" approach? These days, there's a lot more to the iSeries than RPG. Cheers! Hans
** This thread discusses the article: Piracy, Bootlegging, and Copying **
You know that old, often misunderstood saying: "The customer is always right". It doesn't mean that you can count on the customers always making the right decisions. It means that whatever your potential customers decide, as a whole, must be accepted. If they've decided not to buy your product, you have to accept that reality. Bob: You may well be right. Perhaps there's no good profitable market for RPG procedure libraries. As someone pointed out in another discussion, a commercial procedure library may well save some programmer some time, but that company still has to pay for the programmer who can develop comparable functionality in-house. I still remember the debates that went on in the early 1990's regarding OS/2, and how difficult it was for a company to sell OS/2 products. This discussion sounds very similar. The bottom line is that you have to support yourself and your family. No matter how you or anyone else feels about RPG, if you can't do that with RPG tools, then no one would have any right to complain if you decided to leave the RPG software market. Clearly, you have some tough decisions to make. But I don't think leaving the iSeries world altogether has to be on the table. RPG may not be where the action is, but there's a lot of interesting potential in other aspects of the system. You have clear strengths in education and training. Perhaps you just need to add more diverse technologies to your training menu. If more and more people are doing Java, you could provide training to help people integrate RPG and Java code? Or help people integrate RPG into the LAMP stack? (I think I suggested elsewhere that this approach might be the best way to keep RPG alive.) Anyways, I don't mean to tell you how to run your business. But perhaps you need to be a bit more pragmatic and temper your "RPG über Alles" approach? These days, there's a lot more to the iSeries than RPG. Cheers! Hans
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