Posts: 1370 from 2003/2/15
From: Central Europe
@ takemehomegrandma
Quote:
MHO x86 makes sense in a desktop context, but MorphOS can't compete on the desktop market;
You have been repeating this for quite some time. However, running a successful business is in most cases not at all about "beating" your competition but rather finding your niche.
Quote:
So if MorphOS would jump to a different architecture, and if the ambitions are above forever being merely a hobby project
In simple terms, developing a piece of software as a business requires you to generate sufficient revenue to cover all costs and preferably still have enough left to build up cash reserves for weak periods or emergency expenses.
That is all you have to do.
Let us assume that you focus your expenses on what is really important. No private jets. No first-class flights from the US to Europe and back. No fancy sports cars. No expensive offices. No redundant lawsuits.
How many sales do you need in order to turn your hobby into a profession? 100 million units? 1 million units? 100.000 units?
You can do with a lot less, actually. For the sake of this discussion, let us assume your software product is an operating system that includes a suite of every-day applications and runs on fairly common hardware. If you manage to sell a mere 2.000 units per year at $100 each, you generate 200.000 USD in revenue. At an admittedly modest average income of 3.000 USD per month, this is sufficient to pay 5 full-time developers or 10 part-time developers at half the salary or a combination of these. At the end, you would still have $20.000 left to pay other expenses or to save up.
Now, there is no need to pick apart small details of my example which is obviously very simple and abstract .The point I am trying to make is that you can in fact run a sustainable business with comparably small sales volumes as long as you can keep them at a constant level thanks to continuous product innovation.
Quote:
then I would vote for ARM.
What we do know for a
fact right now is that there are at the very least hundreds of people in the world who are willing to spend half a thousand dollars and more in order to buy custom hardware and a keyfile for the single purpose of being able to run MorphOS and compatible applications.
Would it be possible to raise sales numbers if the supported desktop hardware was more widely available, possibly cheaper and overall had a better price-performance ratio? Well, nobody can say for sure.
However, this - purely hypothetical - scenario sure sounds considerably more realistic than any vague dreams about large OEM deals for low-performance hardware (with cut-throat pricing, thus tiny margins for system software), embedded usage, and so on.
While having grand visions can be
sometimes fruitful, ignoring your existing custumer base is
almost always stupid.
