ColdFusion, and the Mac vs. Windows Problem

Before I get to the ColdFusion "expert" article, I want to discuss an article I just came across by Dale Fraser in which he says, "With that will come the most important bit of the puzzle to sell this great product, the release of pricing information." He ends with "...so I'm hopeful that Adobe will get the pricing right also and knock every one's socks of in the process."

Me too. In fact I'm VERY interesting in finding out what Adobe's strategy is in this regard, as ColdFusion has always suffered from the Mac vs. Windows problem.

When Microsoft started selling computers with Windows 3.1, potential buyers had a choice. Windows or a Mac? Now, Mac people can and will wax rhapsodic about the many advantages of their OS, but from an outsider's point of view the choice wasn't quite so clear.

Here was a computer with windows and a mouse, and there was a computer with Windows and a mouse. To the casual observer, both did the same thing, but one came with a premium price and the other did not. Given two seemingly "identical" systems, buyers typically bought into the cheaper one. Fast forward a decade, and we're in a situation where Window's owns 90% of the desktop market.

And now we come to ColdFusion, a product with a premium price in a market filled with cheaper (read free) alternatives. ColdFusion can pull data from a database and put it on a page. So can PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, and so on. Advocates may state that ColdFusion does it "better", but that's a pretty subjective statement and hard to quantify... especially if you're on the outside looking in.

Continuing the analogy, there's no doubt that Apple is a success financially. But a great deal of that success has come from selling products OTHER than Macs. iPods for one. In the computer market there's no denying that they can create great fusion of hardware and software. Then again, they're still a niche product, with a marketshare percentage still expressed in the single digits.

So what will Adobe do? Will they reduce the cost of ColdFusion to make it more competitive in the marketplace? Will they release it as open-source (doubtful). Or will they stay at the current price point or worse, go higher?

The later option pretty much precludes ColdFusion from gaining significant market share... but that's okay, as long as you're satisfied with selling a niche product.

ColdFusion has transitioned from Allaire to Macromedia to Adobe, and each time it's moved to a new company it's become less and less strategic to that company's goals, and a much smaller segment of that company's overall market. At Allaire ColdFusion was king. Macromedia, however, was seemingly more interested in selling copies of Dreamweaver and in ensuring the Flash became the ubiquitous RIA cross-browser cross-platform standard.

Adobe has similar designs for Flash, plus it's heavily involved in promoting Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Lightroom, and in general maintaining its lead as the platform of choice for designers, graphic artists, and photographers.

So now we come down to the question at hand: WILL Adobe be satisfied with selling a niche product?

Like you, I'm VERY interested in the answer.

Comments

[James R. Taylor]

Guess we saw what happened with the pricing, didn't we?

[Topper]

Great post.

There is one difference - at this stage ColdFusion is almost bigger than Adobe. If they won't be more competitive, the upstarts will simply take over.

Upstarts include Railo and BlueDragon.

[Michael Long]

Probably depends on whether or not the upstarts can keep up. Hmmm.... or if they're not better off going where Adobe is not.

Now THAT bears some consideration...