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Your business model is bang on! OR could have come out with a recompiled
TS4.0 with no memory limitations in charting or the power editor, Y2K
compatibility and many other incremental improvements YEARS AGO. They could
have staggered the new versions of their products over several years instead
of trying to update their whole product line in one release. This way their
programmers could have focused on one product at a time and produced higher
quality programs.
At OR, marketing considerations have completely overtaken all others such
as customer needs and practical software development issues.
There is plenty of evidence for this everywhere you look. One of the most
obvious is the Y2K issue. OR would rather inconvenience, irritate and leave
their customers on tenter-hooks in the name of potential sales of upgrades
rather than release a Y2K patch before releasing TS2000. The fact that the
TS4.0 server has stopped collecting all futures contracts expiring after Jan
1, 2000 means that in order to get the data that was lost we will have to
download refresh data after having installed the Y2K patch. Why should we
have to waste one second of our time in the name of padding OR's bottom
line? Putting your sales ahead of your customers needs is not a viable
long-term business plan.
BTW the only reason they decided to update their entire product line all at
once was to get more marketing bang for their buck. There are marketing,
advertising and sales advantages to be had from product synergy. You can
advertise many products all at once lowering advertising costs and giving
you more bang for your advertising dollar. There is potential for more
sales because you can move more product out the door with "suites", "special
offers" and promotions. New customers can more easily be enticed to buy
additional products that they may not necessarily even need or use when a
whole line of "compatible" products is made available at once.
Meanwhile during the whole time that its taken to prepare this grand
marketing strategy many existing customers are sitting on their hands or
wasting time and money on third-party workarounds to existing TS4.0
limitations.
I believe OR is trying to adapt Microsoft's business model to the trading
software market. But in order to make this work, OR would probably have to
hire many more programmers and quality control people to do the job right.
However, given their current revenue stream, the limited potential customer
base and the shortage of experienced programmers the costs would simply be
too high. Microsoft can afford to do this because their customer base is
much much larger. To summarize, OR's business model is simply not suited to
the current market conditions for trading program products. That's why they
have to go back and adopt something like the "Brownian business model".
Mark you, like myself, have also been following "TradeLab". This may also
be a very feasible model for future trading software development. The UMDS
people develop and hone the Data Server, Microsoft provides the system
programming language (and pays for all future development of VB) and all
Scientific Approaches has to do is work on the charting software and the
UMDS-VB interfaces. This might work but whether they are capitalized well
enough to pull it off remains to be seen (i.e. $1000 beta-testing fee).
Regards,
Mark Cerar.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Brown [mailto:markbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: March 27, 1999 12:40 AM
> To: martin graffman; omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: advice for a newbie
>
>
> if you are not trading something like leaps or futures and do not need to
> look far out for contracts to trade. i would wait for a patch as promised
> and then see what happens. if i was cruz i would recall the ts 2000i
> immediately and get the patch out for 4.0. i would then
> concentrate on the
> improvement of the current architecture of ts 4.0. i would eliminate the
> bar limits and recompile the thing for 32 bit and continue to release
> patches until he has ts 4.0 up to ts 2000i expectations (which would take
> him a year of hard work) i would then release the thing as ts 5.0 and not
> some dated name like ts2000 (who cares) then i would invest in my own data
> feed, forget bmi and signal and the rest they have all gone to
> crap anyway.
> i have just given bill an excellent business model that would eliminate me
> as a competitor against him. i honestly wish he would take my advice, but
> he will not. so now that i am involved in the act of self preservation to
> create a program. i will sleep little until i have shown him the way it
> should have been done. with millions of dollars at my disposal and my
> total income derived from trading and not software sales. i plan to give
> cruz a run for his money and do to him what he did to metastock when that
> company didn't listen to their customers needs for a windows program.
>
> mb
>
> ps there are many upstart software products out there, but until
> i find one
> that will do what i need i am doing my own. tradelab would have been the
> only one that i saw that had the potential to deliver. however it has not
> progressed on schedule as promised and looks to be hopelessly caught in a
> spiral of being lost in the details. so hang tight if you can and demand
> that cruz fix our beloved 4.0 's
>
>
> >I am a newbie. I have used Super Charts EOD for years and I want to
> >learn ELA and use TradeStation for real time. I thank Mark Brown and
> >others for their candor about TS 2000. So here is the question: what
> >should I do at this time? Wait? I'll be grateful for any suggestions.
> >Marting
> >
>
>
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