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Subject: Re: Sorry It is Mr Hyatt or Professor Hyatt ! [& the commercial thingy]

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 17:13:01 08/07/00

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Re:"Sorry It is Mr Hyatt or Professor Hyatt !"

The answer is 'Yes.'

He is a professor at the University of Alababa at Birmingham.
He answers to Dr. Hyatt, Professor Hyatt, Robert Hyatt, Robert, or even Bob.
He doesn't seem to like the formalism much.
============================================================================

I don't think Crafty alone will work on a CD.  You need a lot of work to make a
complete commercial product.  If you look at what something like ChessBase,
ChessAssistant, Rebel, or Fritz can do, then you will see that the engine is a
microscopic (but very important) fraction of the total saleable package.

Crafty and the other freely available Winboard engines are really for technical
people.  Some people who are tech-weenies don't understand why mom and the next
door neighbor don't just install Linux and do a recursive grep to find their
goosberry pie recipie.  The fact is, that even a 5-click Windows install program
with a slick interface like InstallShield can provide is *daunting* to many
non-techie types.

The "low-bar" in price is set by ChessMaster series.  Look at the features that
are available.  In order to sell anything commercially and be successful, you
will need at least the features available at that price.

It's a lot of work to do a complete install setup that is going to work on
hundreds of different computers and a variety of operating systems.  Now, once
you have all that complete, you are still nowhere.

You will need a technical support staff.

You will need a legal staff, or hire a lawyer to do the legal stuff for you.

You will need a product manual that tells how to use each feature of the
product.

In short, it is an enormous amount of work to produce any sort of commercial and
successful tool.

However, for those who are enterprising:
Crafty +
Winboard +
SCID +
Nalimov Tablebase Files

Is a formidable setup.

On the other hand, Chess Assistant will run Crafty and has all sorts of features
that cannot be found in any of the above.

The entire chess program market is strangely small (considering the number of
chess players and computers that are available).



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