This issue marks our fifth issue of VGA support and the letters and phone calls we have received lately are very much in support of the move. I'm more convinced than ever that the move was a good one. Thanks for the comments and keep those cards and letters coming!
I generally use this column as an opportunity to discuss our future plans and I try to get customer feedback about ODM's future. This month I'm going to try a different tack and talk about our past.
On Disk Monthly was originally called "Big Blue Disk," and was the third product offered for public consumption by Softdisk Publishing, way back in 1986. Our first product was, appropriately enough, called "Softdisk" and was for the Apple II computer in 1981. We launched "Loadstar" for the Commodore 64 soon after (1983). Since the launch of Big Blue Disk we also have created products for the Macintosh (Diskworld - 1988), the Apple II GS (Softdisk-GS - 1989) and the Commodore 128 (Loadstar 128 Quarterly - 1989). All of these products are still in publication and doing well, but we did launch three products that did not succeed; PC Business Disk, our Game Disk, and DTPublisher.
Most of these have been monthly subscription products (except for DTPublisher and PC-Business Disk which were bi-monthly and Loadstar 128 Quarterly). We have recently begun to experiment with other channels (such as retail markets or direct mail catalog sales) but it is still too soon to determine whether these new channels will be profitable.
So, why go into all this stuff? As usual, because I want to get some feedback on a debate we are having here at Softdisk Central. To put it simply, "Should we do a Windows version of ODM?" Now, keep in mind a few things... Windows programming is generally more difficult than DOS programming and is, therefore, more expensive, so we would probably have to charge more for a Windows disk (but not much more). Also, we would have to do a lot of "cross-development" of programs on the two disks. In other words, we would have both a DOS and a Windows version of the same program MUCH more frequently than we are doing now.
The alternative to this approach is to take a few of the best DOS programs that we are doing and convert them to Windows for sale as retail items. Of course ODM subscribers would get a price break on the items, but we would probably stop publishing the Windows items on ODM itself. We would probably also develop new Windows programs from scratch for the same market.
Or, finally, we can continue what we are doing now, which is to publish a few Windows items on each issue of ODM.
To wrap this up, here are the three points of the debate:
