T/Maker: Tiny Software Company Takes on the Giants (Interview)
An interesting look at a company with less than 20 employees playing with the big boys
This is an interesting interview. The early years of the personal computer industry were full of little companies like this. Most either went out of business or were purchased. Others were Microsoft and Apple.
For more information on some of the people involved, check out Peter Roizen’s website (he created the T/Maker application the company was named after) and Heidi Roizen’s website.
from the October 1988 issue of MicroTimes
# T/maker interview
T/Maker: Tiny Software Company Takes On The Giants
Says president Heidi Roizen: “We do it with a very small number of people and a lot of mirrors.”
By Dennis Erokan and Mary Eisenhart
T/Maker is a small Bone by anybody’s standards, having hired its fourteenth employee only this year. Ninety-nine percent of its stock belongs to its 30-year-old president, Heidi Roizen, and 29-year-old VP/chairman Royal Farros, who first met as students at Stanford, where they received master’s degrees in business and engineering respectively.
Despite its size, however T/Maker enjoys a significant presence in both the Macintosh and PC markets—as reflected, perhaps, in the fact that Roizen is currently president of the Software Publishers’ Association. Its ClickArt series has been a mainstay in the Mac marketplace since 1984; the ClickArt concept has moved to the PC and Windows environment, most recently with the debut of T/Maker’s ClickArt Scrapbook+, WriteNow, the Macintosh word processor, which T/Maker publishes in in connection with Steve Jobs’s NeXT Inc., is now in its much-enhanced second version.
“[Microsoft’s] Bill Gates,” says Roizen, “says companies like us are like the little fish that dart in and out. We’re the niche companies. We can accomplish things. We can grow by continually innovating because we have the authority to make decisions that the bigger companies don’t have.”
In an industry often beset by the problems of nearly uncontrolled growth, where the successful startup often collapses under the weight of its own expansion or is gobbled up by a monolithic corporation, T/Maker is an anomaly. Founded in 1979 by Roizen’s brother and named after a database product he'd written (which the company still uses to handle its accounts), it was incorporated in 1983. Since the company has never had outside investors, bank loans or similar external pressures, Roizen and Farros are in the enviable and nearly unique position of controlling the evolution of T/Maker and its products.
So committed are they to this vision that, in contrast to the rest of the industry, T/Maker has twice sold successful products to other publishers rather than undertake the rapid expansion required to support them: ClickArt Personal Publisher (now PFS: First Publisher), the first desktop publishing package for the PC, to Software Publishing Company, and ClickOn Worksheet, a spreadsheet and graphics desk accessory for the Mac, to Borland as an enhancement for Sidekick.
“The two of us kind of drive the company,” says Roizen. “We look at the market and look at the players and look at our own objectives as people—we want to be a quality place, we want to be in it for the long haul, we want to reward the people we work with. We want to work on projects that are personally exciting. We want to pick markets that have the characteristics that can be supported by a company like T/Maker, a small company as opposed to a company with massive banks of telephone operators waiting for your call.
“People perceive us, I think, as being a lot larger than we are—we have 14 people, which is the biggest we’ve ever been, but I think people think of us as being much larger. But we do it with a very small number of people and a lot of mirrors.”
We visited T/Maker’s Mountain View offices shortly before the Macworld Expo. In the midst of frenetic activity centered around the rollout of Scrapbook+ and the final touches on WriteNow 2.0, Roizen and Farros discussed their company’s history and future, and reflected on the particular problems and opportunities facing small vendors in the software marketplace.
How did T/Maker come into existence?
Heidi Roizen: We were founded in 1979 when my brother wrote a spreadsheet program. We used to support 182 different formats—TRS-DOS, Apple II with CP/M cards—and we used to sit here at midnight and make the disks for the orders for the next day.
We incorporated in ’83. We didn’t have any venture capital; we were just running off the sales of the product, which were about $200,000 at that time. We pretty much spent the first year learning how to run the business and making lots of mistakes.
It was right around the heyday of when Lotus was making its big splash, and so we thought we’d do 1/100 of what Lotus does and we could get 1/100 of the sales, and we could all be rich and happy. And it sort of didn’t work that way.
Why didn’t it work that way?
Well, I think that it was pretty much an all-or-nothing game. The people with presence got sales, and the people with no presence didn’t get sales. So we had kind of this cult following; T/Makeris a really unusual product—it’s very difficult to learn, I would say, but once you learn it you can do anything. It kept the company going.
Once we had the system in place, we realized that one product wasn’t enough, and that it would be incrementally beneficial to add more products. That’s when we started looking around to say “rather than be a developer who self-publishes, let’s be a publisher who happens to have one self-developed product.”
We came up with the idea for ClickArt in late ’83. We saw a Mac, thought it was really neat, and brought one in here in January of ’84, the week before it was introduced.
Everyone was playing with MacPaint, and everyone was pretty bad. Except one guy drew this really good picture of Chuck Yaeger.
Royal Farros: It was the first intelligent drawing we saw. Everything else looked like what the Mac used to be called—a sophisticated Etch-A-Sketch.
HR: So we decided that it would be a really good idea, when these things came out, to put together a collection of images. From the day we thought of it to the day we shipped it was eight weeks. Then once we started rolling on that, we continued with more Mac products.
We’ve noticed that Mac companies have a hard time breaking into the PC market. PC companies havea hard time breaking into the Mac market. So we’re kind of uniquely positioned because we got started in the Mac so early and because we originally came from the PC market. We were a little more used to the idiosyncrasies of each market.
RF: That’s one of the ways that we first got a shot at Personal Publisher—here was this developer, and he had this terrific idea for doing this painting environment on the PC that would be very Mac-ish. And he went to all of what he perceived as the big Macintosh publishers, and said, “I have this great Mac product I want to do in the PC market.” And no one would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Everyone was frightened to compete in the PC marketplace, whereas when he approached us, we saw the value of it right away. Since we’d been in the PC market, that didn’t scare us at all.
HR: It should have, but it didn’t...(laughs)
RF: When we were first estimating the size of the market, we thought, “Jeez, if we could just sell 500 of these things a month, we’ll be doing great.” And when it came out the gate, we were selling 5,000 a month.
We worked with Hewlett-Packard in those days, and they had never seen their fonts onscreen; they never thought they needed screen equipment because the PC wasn’t WYSIWYG. So they were just amazed by this, and they sent out a corporate message to all their sales centers: “This company T/Maker has a real live PageMaker competitor in the PC world that works with the LaserJet and the Vectra—have a sales seminar and get ‘em in.”
Well, in one month we were invited to something like 26 H-P seminars to be the keynote speaker.
HR: We pegged the market so well in that particular situation that we couldn’t grow the company to the kind of adequate level that we wanted to and still control the product and do a good job with it. It needed printer drivers and other things to be done with it, and when you're a publisher that’s more difficult to do, at least at the stage we were at.
It all goes back to our philosophy as a company, of what we really want to do. We look at ourselves as a value-added publisher, and we think we’re unique in the business, because as I look around I don’t see another company exactly pursuing the strategy we're pursuing in terms of turning products, as we did with ClickOn Worksheet to Borland or with Personal Publisher, which is now First Publisher at SPC.
We look at it this way—products have different characteristics that suit them to one type of publishing versus another. Sometimes we’ve taken on products and have built them to a level where their need for a company behind them exceeded our desire to grow the company.
So you would rather have control of the company than control of the products?
HR: Well, we like to have both. But our basic theory, first and foremost, is if you don’t control your company, you don’t control your destiny. Our sense was that we wanted to maintain the control. We’re always re-evaluating this, but our current feeling is we’d like to grow without ever needing any outside investment. We have no debt, no venture capital, no outside investors and no outside shareholders.
We’ve taken on the concept of controlling your products more and more as a publisher. But the problem with having complete control is that you lose that creativity that brings the interesting products in in the first place. That’s why we believe that there’s a place for a niche publisher like ourselves—we’re accessible enough, people can come in. We're close enough to the ground, because we’re small, that we think we understand _what kind of products will be the next wave.
We have the benefit of being in on new hardware, being in on what the other publishers are doing. I think we have a pretty good track record: we had integrated software in ’79; we had the fifth product for the Mac; we had desktop publishing for the PC in ’86; we had word processing on the Mac before all the other guys got in, and now we have a graphics application under Windows, which is the first of its kind. Sol think we’ve done a fairly good job of sensing those trends, and it’s not any sort of brilliance or divine knowledge, it’s just because we’re basically computer users here.
How did WriteNow come to T/Maker?
HR: There was a company called J.T. Solaster up in Seattle. They were known to be good programmers, and Apple commissioned them to do a word processor.
RF: Actually Apple got cold feet about whether MacWrite was going to make it on time for the Macintosh rollout. They had visions of “we have this graphical machine, it has this thing called MacPaint on it—and nothing else?” It really is a $2500 Etch-A-Sketch at that point.
HR: So they had these guys write this thing called MacAuthor as backup code. But MacWrite got done, and they shipped with that, and they kind of lost interest in these guys. And as they learned, these guys were meticulous, and somewhat slow in getting the product done anyway.
Well, Steve Jobs really liked the product. He liked it so much that he bought their company. He bought the source code to the product, they moved the company down here, and they said, “Let’s finish it.” And one of the terms of the deal was that ultimately Steve would market it for the Macintosh market to make some money back for these guys.
RF: The idea was that WriteNow was supposed to be the same as MacWrite, but these guys got so aggressive with it, coding in 100% assembly language, multiple columns, footnotes, that they actually took it way beyond that. So it was in Steve’s mind that this was going to be the replacement for the Mac’s entry-level business word processor.
HR: Steve drove it a lot and continued to keep the features going, and played a fairly big hand in it.
RF: We think all of that’s significant because, if nothing else, WriteNow is very easy to use, because it was designed as either a companion product or a replacement for MacWrite. You don’t see that in a lot of the newer products that are coming out—they’re all going “let’s all violate the Macintosh interface as much as possible.”
HR: Meanwhile, two of our developers went off and took jobs at NeXT. So they were sitting around one day at NeXT, and at this time there were probably 20 employees, and they decided that they didn’t know anything about publishing software (laughs), which was very good for us. And the two developers who had worked for us said, “Well, we know some people who know how to publish software...”
So they invited us up for lunch, and it was rather funny. I went for one reason, which was that I’d never met Steve Jobs and I thought, “I’ve been making money off the Macintosh for years, and wouldn’t this be interesting…(laughs) I'll go up and give them a little one-hour mini-lesson.”
We had about a three-hour meeting. Steve came in about halfway through and just grilled me: “How much does this cost?” “What distributor’s the best?” “How do you get them to sell your product?”
Then we went off on our merry way, because we were in the heat of Personal Publisher and getting that shipped, and they went off on their merry way, and discovered that it was very distracting for them to try to start a software publishing business.
RF: Also, as soon as they ship a machine, Steve’s going to be on the cover of everything including Field and Stream. Everyone was waiting for Steve’s next product, and it would be anticlimactic for it to be a word processor.
HR: So we went back in. We had sold Personal Publisher, and, then a month later we sold ClickOn to Borland. Right when we signed the deal, Philippe Kahn turned to us and said, “What are you guys going to do? You don’t have any more products.” So we went home and thought, “What are we going to do? We don’t have any more products.” (laughs)
So we went back to NeXT and said, “Hey, why don’t you let us do it?” It kind of just felt right—they had gotten comfortable with us, we had a good in with these developers...
RF: We had people tugging on Steve’s shirt saying, “Let them do it, let them do it...”
HR: And also, what was nice—when we sit down to negotiate a contract, we’re not like some product manager who has to answer to four levels or something. It was a very unique deal—no one else could have done it, because I don’t think anyone else would’ve been willing to sit down and craft such an unusual deal. Steve wanted to have a say in the look of the materials. We normally never give a developer prior approval, but in this case... They wanted to have more of the reward, so they shared the risk with us. It’s more like a joint venture than a typical royalty deal—they actually help us pay some of the marketing expenses.
RF: When we started out contractually, the upgrade to 2.0 was only going to be a few items, a few feature improvements on a very low level. We said to ourselves, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, because we’re going to sell a lot of products and these are the type of people who aren’t going to orphan customers.”
The people up there—the “father of the Macintosh” and the whole family of the Macintosh—felt very passionate about it. They’re going to feel passionate about making a word processor that’s very contemporary in the marketplace.
When we announced the upgrade, it had 16 feature changes over 1.0, which was about four times as many as we were supposed to get in the first place. We were pretty happy about that. We knew that we were going to add even more on.
HR: We log every user request, and we take those to NeXT every month. This is good feedback for them—think of beta testing the word processor for the NeXT machine on 50- or 60,000 Macintoshes. It’s given us a lot of leverage when we come back and say “We want this feature” —it’s not “We want this feature,” it’s “Here are 87 people who called this week who would like to have this feature.” They’ve really been good about taking that element of personal pride in the product.
RF: The final 2.0, when it ships, will have over 50 features, improvements, changes to the program, over 1.0. Since we announced it, we’ve quadrupled the number of features that we were giving people. As far as ease of use goes, WriteNow is easy to use, and as far as speed goes, it’s the performance word processor for the Macintosh world. We also want to give people the tools they need to use it as a professional tool. Writers are probably one of our big markets out there, and yet we didn’t have features that were critical to writers. So we added those features.
We took this wish list and set up a preliminary chart. Mailmerge was the number one single item. Cursor keys was the number two item. Translator issues—linking the Translator {which in version 1.0 required the user to quit the application in order to import or export files in other formats] inside, making it transparent. Those cumulatively were the most requested items.
What we’ve added on subsequently is fixed-line spacing. Jonathan Seybold does his Seybold Report on WriteNow, and he said, “I will stop using this if I don’t get fixed line spacing, because my paragraphs can’t break up vertically. Say I’m working with 10-point type with 11-point leading; when I put a superscript in there, the paragraph shouldn’t break apart.” So we thought Jonathan was probably pretty representative. . .
We’ve added word count, character count, paragraph count. Case change— more writing-type tools. Smart quotes.
A lot of the things that we’re adding in wouldn’t have been very pertinent if we'd talked about them a month ago. Now they’re very pertinent, because everybody's comparing what FullWrite has to Word, and what WordPerfect has, and some of these things are the differentiating pieces in the puzzle.
The product’s been progressing behind the curtains all along. Our number-one requested item a year and a half ago was PageMaker compatibility, and we worked with Aldus to do the import and export features, just as we worked with Quark, just as we worked with Ready-Set-Go to make sure those were all direct import-export compatible.
HR: A lot of these features may seem small, but one of the things that we’ve always been recognized for is the feel of WriteNow—when a person uses it, how intuitive it is and how well the features fit together. So 50% of that was which features to implement, and the other 50% was how. We spent marathon meetings deciding should this be two dialog boxes or one, and what order should they be in, and which thing should be on top.
We seriously spent a whole day on one menu. I guess at a bigger company you'd probably have a person doing that who doesn’t really talk to the users, but at this company you have Royal, myself, the guy who’s been doing the coding and the woman who heads tech support. The four of us sat down and went through it feature by feature. We went into a room and decided we would not come out until all issues had been resolved.
RF: And that was just to finalize the interface.
HR: Given the way the market has shaped up, everyone else seems to be dragging their word processors into desktop publishing; our belief is that users still need a solid word processor. People who do a lot of document work and not so much graphics work. So we really decided not to add things like picture wrap and box-drawing tools; we’d love to do that stuff over time, but let’s focus our immediate attention on making it the kind of tool that a writer or a word processing person can sit down with and have it be the most intuitive tool possible for that kind of work, and not encumber it with the kind of formatting options that are really not used in day-to-day business correspondence or documentation.
Because you see your commitment to the company in terms of the long haul, how do you get away from being overwhelmed with detail?
HR: We’re trying. You learn to slowly let things go. But there are sometimes you shouldn’t let things go, and I think one of the big mistakes people make when their companies grow is that they forget to stay close to their products. I can do a demo of any of our products probably as well as anybody on the staff can, and I think that’s really important, because if you don’t even know what your own products do, how can you be in this business?
The things I’m trying to let go of—I’m looking for a CFO, I’ve been actively interviewing people, because I still currently handle all the financial dealings of the company, and need to let go of that. I recognize that there’s a certain point at which my unique value to this company is not in my amazing ability to balance our checkbook. Even though I’m very good at it (laughs), it’s probably not the best use of my time, so in a way I’m cheating the company by sitting here balancing the checkbook and running the monthly royalty reports. You have to know when to let go and when not to.
Ultimately this market is different from the days of ’79 when we sat here at night and made up disks and put them in Baggies. We need to have the million-dollar ad budgets and distributors all over the place ready.
This week Scrapbook is shipping, and so two people from T/Maker, which is 15% of our staff (laughs), are down in LA doing a rollout to every distributor. You can’t do that when you're an individual developer—you just don’t have the time.
As a small company, how has your experience been in dealing with the retailers and dealers? Do you feel that you understand what’s going on out there?
HR: We’ve really learned a lot about this. I think as a small company we’ve learned where we fit in, but we’d love to break to a new level. But it’s hard.
Is breaking through to a new level largely a matter of distributors noticing you?
RF: It’s not really distributors. For the most part the successful publisher doesn’t rely on the distributor pushing product down the channel. Rather, we're pulling customers through. That’s really important—you can look at successful software companies and successful publishers, and they do that.
In the marketplace, at least for the Macintosh, 50% of the market is through the traditional channel, through the Businesslands, the ComputerLands, the Entres, through the places where you buy an IBM PC. You don’t buy a clone, you buy an IBM PC.
The other 50% is the non-traditional channel, the mail order side, the Eggheads, the discount stores, the independents. ComputerWare. Computer Attic. Typically you find knowledgeable buyers buying through this channel, and uninformed buyers buying through the traditional channel.
The specialty stores, the mail order, the non-traditional channel, they really sell what’s hot. It’s the best product that gets sold there. They’re all intelligent.
We’re now distributed through Businessland, and Businessland said one time, “Well, we just don’t understand. We read great reviews about WriteNow, and everybody who uses it loves it, but we just don’t have a lot of users knocking down our doors for it.” And Heidi said, “Well, if you know enough about WriteNow to know that this is the word processor for you, then you know enough not to buy it at Businessland, that you can get a better price at one of the other stores.”
HR: That’s the nut we’ve got to crack. WriteNow always rates higher than the other products, our users love us, we’ve done very well in what we call the knowledgeable channel. The problem is that the very person that WriteNow is designed for, the novice users who don’t know what they want, would be so happy to have it, are likely to never get it, because if they walk into a Businessland, MacWrite is sitting there, the name is ingrained. Even Microsoft Write didn’t do that good a job in that channel.
So how do you break through that?
RF: There’s different ways that you can do it, but it really starts with talking to the users, the press, everything.
[Silicon Beach’s] SuperPaint’s an interesting example of how someone successfully cracked into the traditional channel. They had a product where all the reviews originally came out and said “Don’t buy MacPaint, buy SuperPaint. SuperPaint is the most terrific product in the world.”
And that signals to the traditional channel that uh-oh, what the end users are hearing now is not what we’re telling them. That is, if somebody walks in to buy SuperPaint, and the traditional channel rep says, “Well, why don’t you buy MacPaint?”, he says, “Well, this guy told me not to.” That’s how you start it, so obviously one of the important things we’re doing with WriteNow 2.0 is trying to get a clear message of what that product is, because in our marketplace we really feel that we’re the superior choice.
HR: The problem in doing so is that we're competing against Claris and Microsoft, which seem to have unlimited resources in promoting their products. It’s a very expensive proposition.
But what a company like ours can do is take a subset—“Let’s focus on one particular chain, one geographical area, and get our people out there. Do the training, do the spiffs, get out there.” But you’d be amazed at how many stores you can Call up and say “We want to send our VP of sales, just to give you a product demo,” and they don’t even want to do that, ’cause they say “Why should I have to know it?”
That’s what we see as the pathetic state of the industry, and we hope that the people like ComputerWare and Computer Attic will really succeed, because ultimately there’s a gross misconception about software. People think it’s easy enough to figure out from the back of the box which product is right for them, and it would be just as silly as going to a record store and picking an album based on the names of the songs.
You need more input, and you need a knowledgeable source of information. If we can’t even get to that source to provide the information, how is that person ever going to be able to provide it to the user in turn? It’s a real problem.
RF: We used to always go line up our opportunities and take whichever opportunities were easiest for us. For example, last year in the higher education market WriteNow outsold Microsoft Word. That was something where we said, “This is a terrific fit and we can get to those people.” So we kind of changed our whole organization around so that we could get to those people, and we were successful. The idea is, you have to look in a global sense. You have to say, “If we're going to get university site licenses, this is not going to be one call.” It’s going to be a three- or four- month sales hike, so recognize that you have to set up your resources and your plan of attack in going after a three- or four- or five-month cycle. In the same way, going after chains, there are other methodologies that you have to use, so right now we’re kind of changing our organization around so that we'll be structured to go after the chains, because that’s one of our last frontiers. We’re even making pretty big inroads in the corporate marketplace. The corporate marketplace is very similar to the education marketplace, although it relies more on what’s going on in the traditional retail stores than the education markets.
You have 14 employees. What do they do?
HR: First of all, everyone does more than one thing. One of our friends said, “You don’t have a 14-person company, you have a 28-person company, it’s just that each person does two full-time jobs.”
We break it down into two areas, marketing and technical. But the marketing people have do time on tech support, and the technical people have to do booth duty at the trade shows. They definitely cross over a lot.
We have basically no administrative people. We all do our own letters and memos. We offload as much as we can—we don’t do our own shipping, we don’t do our own warehousing.
We tend to try to keep this organization as tight as possible, because you never know when you're going to have to change what you're doing. It’s the lean and mean attitude, another of the great T/Maker concepts.
Do you think you’d ever see a product that was so spectacular that you’d want to pour all your resources into it, hire lots of people, go all-out?
RF: In a sense you're describing what we did with Personal Publisher and WriteNow, but really what we do is keep adding time onto our weekends.
HR: The problem with gearing up and staffing up, which people don’t realize, is you have to spend a lot of money before you ever make it back. Which means you have to bring in a venture capitalist or bank loans or something.
We’ve been profitable. In a way it’s a quirky kind of compliment to say that we’ve got two products [Scrapbook+ and WriteNow 2.0] coming out, one of which is three months late and the other of which is five months late, and we're still in business (laughs). That’s pretty good—we’ve supported our own delay there.
RF: Other people would go out of business because of that. au
HR: For example, with WriteNow 2.0—unlike another great Macintosh word processor company, we’ve had the upgrade announcement out, and we have $150,000 worth of checks and credit card orders ready to roll, which we actually went and put in a safe deposit box at the bank. We will not cash those like the other company did and keep them in some account. We don’t even want to transact the business until we can actually do it. It’s nice to have the luxury to make those kinds of decisions and be able to do it.
We have been staffing up, but we do it at our own pace. We’re currently 14, 15 people, a year ago we were probably 10. We’ll probably be 20 by the end of the year, because we’re going to accommodate the Windows stuff. We're moving into office space that’s double the size of this space. We’re doing things, but at our pace. I honestly can’t imagine any product for which we would have to staff up and believe that we could honestly accomplish it.
I think that people fool themselves when they think, “If I just had twice as many people I'd take on Microsoft.” I look at it this way—we took on Microsoft, and we managed to ship whatever we're up to now—60,000 copies of WriteNow.
(laughs)When Write came out— we're pretty good friends with some people up there, and they let us know in August that they were going to ship this WriteNow killer in November. And it didn’t really do us any damage.
RF: That goes back to where our strengths are. We think if we have a superior product people buy us for a reason. We actually went up, relative to Word, when Write came out.
The person who decided to buy us, Write wasn’t going to change their mind. They had already made a conscious decision to buy us.
We believe that Write stopped selling in the marketplace because all of a sudden what reviewers started saying was, ”Well, you buy it for $175, and for $220 more you can get Word 3.0. For $249 or so street price, you can buy Word anyhow, so if you think there’s going to be any possible chance of your going up to Word 3.0, buy Word 3.0 and use Short Menus.” So what they’re finding is that people are opting for Word and not opting for Write, because they look at the products as being so similar as to be unnecessary.
Heidi, you’re the president of the Software Publishers’ Association this year. How does your experience with T/Maker relate to the industry as a whole?
HR: I think we need organizations like the SPA, particularly the smaller companies and the niche companies. Why reinvent the wheel? It’s a great information resource for developers and publishers to learn things about other publishers—the data report, knowing what kind of software is shipping in what volumes, the information about who’s shipping 3 1/2 diskettes with the 5 1/4s in the IBM products, the salary surveys. As a proponent of industry issues it’s great, and as a publicity vehicle to promote the awareness of the software industry.
I see us working in conjunction with organizations like the Software Entrepreneurs’ Forum; I’m also on the advisory board of SEF, because I really believe that the needs of the developers are different from the needs of the publishers, but they need to interact. I joke about it with those guys that it’s sort of like sororities and fraternities, but nobody ever likes that analogy.
I think this is a wonderful industry. First of all, there’s so much profit margin in it relative to the actual hard costs, and there’s so much growth potential and there’s so much ability, and in fact necessity at this point, for all of us to work together. I mean, you go try to sell a Mac product that’s incompatible with every other popular Mac product and see how far you get.
Things like format standards—silly little things like a clipboard standard for Encapsulated PostScript in the Windows world. As silly as that sounds, since nobody bothered to do it, and there are like five companies that probably should have done it, they’re probably going to end up with five formats unless we all sit down as a group.
My goal in the SPA is to promote the concept that in spite of the fact that we all compete against other, there are many, many ways to cooperate.
If you’re approaching your business morally and ethically, you can be a competitor with someone and still cooperate. Look at us and Microsoft—we joke a lot that the reason they’ve been pushing us so much in the Windows market and helping us so much is that they want to distract us from WriteNow. They know we’re so small we can only do so much.
There’s so much growth potential in the industry, why not capitalize on it? Instead of eating each other’s market share, I’d rather be expanding the market and letting us all benefit from it. (T/Maker Company, 1973 Landings Drive, Mountain View, CA 94043, 415/962-0195.).
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