[Manifold-l] Manifold reference clients

[Simon Linder]

>I don't forsee much change in price until we wipe out ESRI and the others.
>At that point I suppose we will be able to lower prices without getting too
>much pushback from agencies and fat-headed bureaucrats, because there will
>be no alternatives. They'll end up buying Manifold even if the price is
>lower than they want to pay.  I personally think that the direction should
>be lower price, because that is the gateway to selling hundreds of millions
>of copies. This is counter-intuitive for people with low confidence in their
>product, but if you have confidence you know that GIS is highly
>cost-elastic: by lowering the price you sell so many more units that overall
>you make more money.  I could be wrong about this, but I think the future of
>the GIS industry is lower prices, not higher prices.

I think that the biggest barrier to selling hundreds of millions of copies is not the price but usability.  Manifold is an extremely powerful GIS tool and its use of standard windows interface conventions make the program seem familiar.  But as soon as you start working with it it; the difficulties, without investing a lot of time, to do basic things becomes apparent.

As an example I have listed a few of the usability problem areas I have seen in the last few years (by no means exhaustive):

1. Active columns (potentially powerful but the only interface to them is scripting language -good luck attracting hundreds of millions of users to scripting.  Active Columns should be as easy as creating a complex Excel function or even an Access query)

2. Basic display functions seem slow compared to Mapinfo (it takes too long to pan and zoom around a data set.  I know the technical reasons for this but they don't really matter; hundreds of millions of users are not going to wait 10-15 seconds to adjust the view of their GPS track over the last 3 months)

3. Finding the distance between two or more points (probably one of the more common thing people want to do with geocoded datasets requires an in-depth technical knowledge of Earth geometry and scripting to pull it off in Manifold. The default units that are returned are usually degrees - because when the kids ask how far it is from home to Disney World the best answer is .98743 degrees.  I know there are good technical reasons for this complexity but all the crap about projection distortions is not really relevant to the hundreds of millions of customers you are supposedly interested in attracting - it is good to be able to do the complex and highly precise things with Manifold but you need to be able to do the simple - good enough things very easily as well.)

4. Because Manifold can be programmed with visual basic scripting it is a very powerful and flexible tool.  However, unlike with microsoft office products Manifold does not offer a very easy way for the average user to start using that capability.  Most users start using the programming capabilities of Excel by recording, viewing, editing and debugging macros.  Manifold's lack of these capabilities will sorely curtail its extensibility by the average user. 

5. Some of your best and most popular features are hard for the casual user to find.  I think the coolest thing by far with the 7.0 release was the ability to view a google map as a background to my data.  This saves me literally thousands of dollars in detailed street map data that I might otherwise have to buy from the likes of mapinfo.  I was interested in this feature and am relatively computer literate but it took maybe 1.5 hours to figure out how to setup and use this feature.  A casual user would probably never get around to it.  I understand that there are maybe some legal issues but this is just one example of an awesome and generally useful capability that it is worth making a lot easier to find and use.

Your stress on being hard is a mistake when it too narrowly focuses on your current market.  You make a big deal in your diatribe of letting the marketing focus be on your users and having them drive your development.  But here is the problem, if this list is anything to go by your customers are GIS professionals and experts.  This narrow focus is going to keep driving your development to provide more features that appeal to the same group of users.  Your hundreds of millions of copies is a pipe-dream if you keep tailoring your features list to the needs of your current expert GIS market (which I assume is much smaller than "hundreds of millions".

Even the feature request process that you tout is not well geared to making Manifold attractive outside of the professional GIS community.  The requested features with the most votes are probably from the same self-selected group of current Manifold users.  If you keep talking to yourself how are you going to make a product relevant for people who are not currently even casual GIS users? 

Ease of use concerns should not be viewed as a dumbing-down of GIS.  I think Manifold could be made a lot easier to use for the casual or average user and still maintain and extend all of the advanced capabilities for the professional expert users.  Advances in usability will in the end also benefit the expert users.  Excel after all is used at home for making simple lists and adding up numbers in two columns as well as by investment banks doing complex financial modeling.

Your essays are always entertaining as well as informative but your description of the backwards cost-consciousnnes of bureaucracy while both funny and probably accurate misses the point entirely.  You maybe able to sell tens of millions more copies at the current price of 245 if Manifold was easier to use for a wider market. Price is just one part of the picture - one that you have done a glorious job with.  Power and capability is another thing that Manifold does extremely well.  But the final (and probably easiest) piece of the puzzle is ease-of-use and that is somewhat lacking.

Manifold is a great product and to make it awesome only requires making its capabilities useful to a wider audience; cost (at the current pretty low price of 245), I believe, may be less of a factor than you seem to think. 

     

-----Original Message-----
>From: Dimitri Rotow <dar at manifold.net>
>Sent: Oct 18, 2006 12:40 PM
>To: manifold-l at lists.directionsmag.com
>Subject: RE: [Manifold-l] Manifold reference clients
>
>
>I think it's time to remind everyone of the price strategy Manifold has
>always espoused, a strategy that has served us well for years. [I think I
>end up inflicting an essay like this every year or two, so apologies to
>those who have suffered through previous versions... :-) ]
>
>First a comment: much to our regret the market has consistently demanded
>higher pricing from Manifold than we have wanted.  If you go back to the
>dawn of time (the late '90s...) you can actually find advertisements for
>Manifold at $97.  I believe that 4.50 first came out at $145. The company
>was designed to be profitable at well under $100 per unit revenue.  There
>were good reasons for that, as this essay describes.
>
>You have to remember that manifold.net came out of the crucible of the PC
>clone wars in which the Wintel clone architecture established its hegemony
>over desktop architectures, nay, more to the point *defined* the idea of a
>unified desktop architecture.  People often forget that what made that PC
>architecture a universal standard was the cloning of IBM's "PC" architecture
>by a horde of mostly-Asian vendors.  They rushed in where larger companies,
>like HP, DEC and others, hesitated to tread.  And not only did they
>collectively standardize upon a clone architecture, they pushed price down
>to unprecedented levels by combining Chinese focus on price reduction (and a
>Chinese willingness to be personally hardened in the effort) with US
>attitudes to hardware and software and a connection to US and other first
>world markets.  It was that combination of early adoption by many deft
>players together with a low price that opened ownership to billions of
>people that established the Wintel clone standard.
>
>There were thousands of companies and their suppliers hovering in an orbit
>around Intel, the BIOS vendors, etc. Some made their own motherboards and
>did complete systems manufacturing and some simply put together components
>like motherboard and chassis.  Many, like Dell, started by assembling
>systems and then moved up the food chain to manufacturing more and more of
>their own parts.
>
>A hallmark of the day was the relentless price pressure exerted upon all
>such participants by what insiders at Intel referred to as the "Chinese
>factor."  This was before mainland China took over all production, but
>already Taiwan was manufacturing incredible value and Chinese owners and
>managers were establishing expatriate operations in Silicon Valley and
>elsewhere to apply Chinese sensibilities with  a ruthless focus on cutting
>cost.  Because of the low price and high quality established by such
>operations everyone in the clone business was pressured to stay competitive.
>Even very large vendors like Compaq, IBM and (ultimately) Intel itself and
>DEC could not get too far out of line.
>
>"Being Chinese" (something we Westerners aspired to... the phrase was not
>used as a pejorative but rather as an esteemed objective) meant achieving
>that ruthless focus on the essential, to deliver maximum, total value
>without sacrificing quality or performance.  It's amazing just how much cost
>is wasted in business on nonessential guff that has no bearing whatsoever on
>quality or performance.  Being Chinese is a meditation on the essentials and
>a willingness to harden oneself and one's organization into a ruthless
>competitor.   The phrase now is very dated, but the lessons remain the same.
>
>The key lesson is to be hard, be tough, be focused on the essentials and
>above all to drive your costs and your prices down before the competition
>has any chance at all to do it to you.  In those days that meant clone
>businesses would set up in warehouses without a shred of carpet or fancy
>furniture or even lobbies or offices.  All was done on the production floor.
>I remember one day at a clone facility they heard that WalMart headquarters
>was so famously cheap that when salesmen came to call WalMart did not
>provide them drinks but instead pointed to a soda machine in the lobby from
>which they could buy soda.  They all laughed at WalMart's profligacy in
>wasting that floor space on the machine - the Chinese clone ethos was that
>the salesmen should come fed and ready to work without wasting your floor
>space on luxuries such as soda machines.  [WalMart says they make money on
>that machine, but I doubt they actually do. :-)]  
>
>Another lesson on being hard is looking at the heart of the business,
>cutting out all the fluff and doing the essential core at such a low price
>with such high quality and superior performance that you kill off all the
>competitors who continue to carry the cost burden of fluff.  The analogy in
>the GIS business is that if you provide a truly superior GIS product at
>1/20th the price of competitors it really does not matter whether or not you
>send people off to trade shows. You're going to kill off competitors who may
>do a great job of delivering the warm fuzzies at trade shows but who fail to
>match your accomplishment in the heart of the matter.
>
>Competitors who disdain price competition are being lazy and degenerate and
>are setting themselves up for a big fall when they encounter someone who
>knows how to wield the price weapon.  Price competition is not simply a
>lower price: it is a *much* lower price combined with *superior* quality and
>performance. That takes a very hardened and expert crew to pull off. 
>
>I can't think of any other market that had so much fluff and excess price
>gouging in it as the GIS market before Manifold.  In fact, the existing GIS
>market consisting of the likes of ESRI was so soft and degenerate that just
>about anyone who came out of the crucible of Being Chinese who entered that
>market would tear into those softies like a bunch of tigers cutting into
>overweight sheep.  In the case of manifold.net, the company was designed by
>battle-hardened veterans who had successfully beat the life out of their
>competitors in the clone industry.  So the company was put together based on
>truly ruthless outlooks as regards price / performance.
>
>That's why Manifold was designed to excel at sub-$100 pricing.  In fact, the
>original break-even design was for $45 a unit, taking a page from the
>Borland launch. These sorts of numbers shock the living-fossil GIS marketing
>types, but the point is not to look at prices as they are - the point of
>Being Chinese is to look at prices where they can be pushed, to get there
>first and, while increasing quality and performance, to use the price weapon
>to behead your competitors.  
>
>So how did pricing on Manifold rise above $100?  We discovered that to
>penetrate classical GIS markets, which we needed to do to recruit long-term
>GIS users and experts to help guide the evolution of the product, we had to
>increase the price or no one would take us seriously.  It's that simple.  If
>we could keep a sub-$100 price for all other users (those entering from
>Microsoft Office, for example) and maintain a higher price just for folks
>coming out of the classical GIS market we'd do so.  But we were not able to
>figure out any ethical way of having two different prices for the same
>thing, so we simply evolved to a price point, $245, that worked reasonably
>well for both markets.
>
>But even a $245 price was not enough.  We had constant complaints from
>Manifold users within larger organizations who said that unless we could
>increase the price by a few hundred more their organizations would not take
>Manifold seriously.  We were advised to create a series of new part numbers
>that would be identical but for the name of the product and the higher
>price, for the sole purpose of catering to the prejudice of larger
>organizations.
>
>That we were not willing to do (that dang ethics thing again...), but once
>Manifold acquired bona fide "enterprise" capabilities we could see our way
>clear to configuring higher-priced products that were legitimately
>differentiated by the presence of "enterprise" features.  But at all times
>we have endeavored to maintain a low price point for those users who don't
>have a neurotic organizational need to demand higher prices.  For example,
>Personal Edition at $245 is darn near very much what is in Ultimate for the
>average individual user.  Even so, Enterprise Edition at $395 is still
>subject to frequent complaints from larger organizations that the price is
>too low. Sad, but true for all of us taxpayers who end up footing the bill
>for such bureaucratic foolishness! :-)
>
>I don't forsee much change in price until we wipe out ESRI and the others.
>At that point I suppose we will be able to lower prices without getting too
>much pushback from agencies and fat-headed bureaucrats, because there will
>be no alternatives. They'll end up buying Manifold even if the price is
>lower than they want to pay.  I personally think that the direction should
>be lower price, because that is the gateway to selling hundreds of millions
>of copies. This is counter-intuitive for people with low confidence in their
>product, but if you have confidence you know that GIS is highly
>cost-elastic: by lowering the price you sell so many more units that overall
>you make more money.  I could be wrong about this, but I think the future of
>the GIS industry is lower prices, not higher prices.
>
>But in the meantime, considering the company was designed to make good money
>at sub $100 pricing, with the pricing structure we have we are not in any
>way limited by cash flow (the understatement of the year). I don't mean to
>aggrieve anyone who is parting with their hard-earned cash for Manifold
>licenses, because of course good cash flow is useful for being a better
>competitor and everyone should be pleased that the income is being used
>sensibly. It's not like the cash is being wasted on thick  carpets or plush
>corporate aircraft.  Even if you are miffed the company could be selling for
>a lower price, take heart that the windfall profit is being invested into
>making a better product for you.
>
>The flood of money has made it possible for Manifold to undertake some truly
>intense technical initiatives to improve the product and to push out the
>envelope of what is considered the baseline for the GIS industry overall.
>For example, doing 64-bits throughout a couple of million lines of code is a
>huge undertaking. It's not something a financial cripple can do.  Once we
>have it, everyone must get it, so our action in this area is pushing the
>rest of the industry to catch up.  To take another example, work for some
>time has been underway on what is by far our most ambitious technical
>undertaking to improve Manifold, an effort so challenging that I don't think
>any other company would attempt it.  But we are doing it and had the
>confidence to commit to it because of the money pouring in.  I expect we'll
>see this begin bearing fruit as soon as 7.50, coming up fairly soon in 2007.
>
>All this is visible (or should be visible) to anyone who has read the
>release notes for a steady stream of releases since 4.50.  There have been
>nearly 4000 items in about four years and the pace is increasing. Anyone
>paying attention to Manifold deliverables can see there has been an obvious
>increase in scale of what is accomplished. That's the real consideration
>here: how the cash flow gets used.  As long as it is used on the product you
>know all is well and our people continue to apply themselves to fierce
>competition and to revel in the joy of creating killer GIS product for the
>benefit of our users at absurdly low price. 
>
>The thing to worry about is not lack of money, it is the corrosive effects
>of too much money if it causes us to go soft in the head and to start doing
>things like start sending executives to polish their own images at speaking
>engagements, sending people to squat and babble at OGC or GITA, deploying a
>government bidding group to sell tiny quantities of overpriced software to
>Uncle Sam and all that other non-core, legacy fluff. 
>
>Ken Olsen, the founder of DEC, often remarked that he didn't worry about DEC
>when times were tough because then people focused on what really needed to
>happen.  He said he worried about DEC when times were flush because then
>people got soft and distracted by all sorts of idiocy.  He was right.
>People who haven't had the experience think I'm kidding, but I assure you it
>is much more difficult to handle too much profit than just enough profit to
>keep expanding in a tough-minded way.  But I think we're up to the
>challenge. :-)
>
>And, by the way, I think the user community can help manifold.net keep a
>focus on the traditional Spartan ways that have made the company so strong.
>Resist calls to get the company involved in non-core activities.  Be
>demanding for more features at the same or lower price.  Keep our developers
>at the forge hammering out better code and the company focused on building
>the tools that everyone else can enjoy.  When GIS people get together at
>conferences or other activities, let the users be the stars of the show.
>What's going on next week at NYS GIS in Lake Placid is a good example of
>that: instead of manifold.net deploying a porky set of company marketing
>hacks it is the user community itself in that region that is speaking out
>about what it is doing with Manifold.  Manifold.net is providing a bit of
>assistance in the background with door prizes and sending a small booth, but
>it is the users and entrepreneurs in the region who are in the spotlight.
>That's the way it should be.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Dimitri
>
>
>
>
>  
>
>_______________________________________________
>Manifold-l mailing list
>Manifold-l at lists.directionsmag.com
>http://www.directionsmag.com/mailman/listinfo/manifold-l