Marketing Your Shareware
And the rules are *still* centered around marketing, no matter what your OS choice. The marketing issues include “are there enough people in this OS market for me to find customers?” and “market size aside, what percentage of these folks are qualified to buy my product — for instance, they don’t already have a competing application?” Shareware is just a distribution method; it doesn’t change the rest of the business issues you have to contend with.
I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to say that the majority of OS/2 users are not net enabled, but I agree that the online contingent is not always representative of the full marketplace. (Thankfully.
) For instance, a very high percentage of IBM’s target market for OS/2 — those corporate folks — do not hang out in an OS/2 newsgroup or putter around on Hobbes. Quite a few don’t know such
things exist. Now, when you *can* manage to sell your product to them, they’re apt to buy hundreds or thousands of licenses at a time; the guy who wrote the (shareware) OS/2 chron had a tidy little business for a while. Reaching those IBM corporate customers isn’t easy, though, and it isn’t going to happen without some kind of marketing.
In fact, that’s one of the many reasons for the WarpTech conference: to give OS/2 users, of whatever user type, a place to gather, and a place to learn about the OS/2 applications available. It’s called _an exhibit floor_.
