Author: Terry Giles
Date: 11:46:38 10/29/04
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On October 29, 2004 at 13:47:16, John Merlino wrote: >On October 29, 2004 at 09:25:50, Tony Petters wrote: > >> >>A Mature Market means the product no longer has significant improvements, so >>there is no point in getting involved in it commercially. An example would be >>wordprocessors. >> >>We all use to fight tooth and nail on rgcc and ccc to get what we want on new >>software releases, now it seems the vast majority have been added, even test >>suites. >> >>It seems with all the great great software available both commercially and >>amateur that there is little room for improvement left. >> >>For example Fritz has virtually every function a person could ever dream of and >>the graphics are certainly adequate for play. >> >>Perhaps, some of you have an opinion on this. >> >>Cordially > >In my humble opinion, chess software has been a "mature market" for many years >already. When Sierra decided to drop the "Power Chess" line because they >couldn't put much of a dent in Chessmaster sales, that pretty much sealed it. It >was pretty obvious that if a big software developer like Sierra (at least as big >as Mindscape at that time) wouldn't bother to compete with us, then we had a >pretty strong hold on the chess software market. That was about six years ago. > >Then, last year, Fluent Entertainment (via our insanely huge publisher, Vivendi >Universal) decided to try cutting into CM's sales by releasing a basic software >package, called Majestic Chess, that had one significant new feature -- the >Chess Adventure. This feature was very well-received by the press and by the >people who bought the program, but sales were very disappointing, and >development of Majestic Chess II was suspended indefinitely (although Fluent >hopes to eventually release a sequel). > >Between Chessmaster in North America (and small but not insignificant sales >throughout the rest of the world) and Chessbase in Europe (and somewhat in North >America), I would say that this has been a two horse race for quite some time. > >jm I own both CM6000 and CM9000 and I believe that the CM10th edition release is evidence enough that the previous version (CM9000) was largely beyond improvement. I see nothing particularly special in the 10th edition that would entice me to 'upgrade' to it. Terry Giles
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