Why did you buy Xara the first time?

[Sheff]

Yes, Art Center in Pasadena. Illustration 94.

Regarding getting Xara into the hands of students: What I think is necessary is to get a kick butt Xara jockey into a classroom as a guest of an open minded instructor, not going through the bureaucracy of proper channels. You'll never get anywhere starting at the top, unless you have a check.

I don't think the current president has any idea of what we're talking about here. Nor do I think he wants to rock the boat. I don't know how much money Art Center gets from Adobe, but I'm sure it's a substantial amount.

What I am proposing is having a Xara expert demonstrate it to a 3rd or 4th term design class, just when they're starting to use Illustrator. If you present them with an easier, faster, cheaper and better alternative, you might open the eyes of students before the become a slave to one program or one company. What harm could it do to give away free samples, or 30 trials of Xara X?

I remember in school, I often had instructors who would invite their friends who were practicing professionals to give slide presentations and talk to their classes, not the entire department or the whole school. I'm sure that this was outside proper channels, as typically it was unnannouced. These visits were just for the benefit of the students in that one class, and I got more out of those visits from professionals than I ever did from official, sanctioned people who were brought in by the department chair.

I don't know how different Art Center is now from when you went there, or even when I went there, but I suspect that it's a lot more political and a lot less practical and much more expensive.

Ultimately the decision is Xara's on how they want to penetrate the market. This is my suggestion.

If you look at the companies that have software on the machines in the labs at Art Center or any other major design school, you will undoubtedly find Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, Macromedia and Maya. These companies have strategically done this and they're reaping the benefits.

I think Xara should do the same. I don't know how possible that is since the school I would guess is 75% Macintosh, 15% SGI, and maybe 10%PC.

I don't know if Xara will ever get huge with print people unless they develop an OS X version.

X on X. How 'bout that?

Sheffield Abella
sheff@sheff.com
www.sheff.com

[rgremill]

Over the weekend, I visited my old college. In the book store they were selling the academic version of Illustrator for $99. I don't know how Xara will ever compete with marketing like that.

[Sheff]

Well, even if something is cheap, it doesn't make it better.

I think Xara needs to give some copies away to students and service bureaus. I'm seeing more service bureaus that accept Corel files. If Corel can do it, so can Xara.

I also think that some high profile, industry award winning Xara users need to appear in publications like Communication Arts and Step-by-Step.

Ink jet printer manufactures sell their printers cheap because they know that they will make more money from consumables like ink. In the case of the Epson 1270, you can't get ink from anyone other than Epson and they know that. But the quality of what the 1270 produces is what keeps me and others coming back.

I believe that the shift can take place. I just has to start somewhere. Sure comparatively Xara is cheap, but it does so much more. I have encountered a lot of reluctance for people to use Xara.

Until it become well known, or is ported to the Mac, nothing much will change.

I also think that Xara needs more features that will truly blow other apps out of the water. As it stands, it does most of the same things that other apps do, just better.

Sheffield Abella
sheff@sheff.com
www.sheff.com

[gwpriester]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> I must say that I think Gary's comments in an earlier post are offensively wrong. I doubt that Corel would stoop to such a level as reverse engineering Xaras code. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Steven

Maybe reverse engineering is not the correct word, but one of the product managers at the time (who is long gone from Corel--as are most) said as much to me when I dined with him in Ottawa, when a buch of us power users were invited to Ottawa for a 3-day focus group.

Arlen Bartch, former VP of International Marketing and partner of i/us.com, said in a keynote speach at one of the CorelWorld conferences that Corel licensed Xara in order to slow the momentum until they could add Xara's best features to DRAW.

DRAW's Web site creations capabilities came about, I was informed by the same product manager, because they looked at NetObject Fusion and said, we can do that.

DRAW is not above copying features from other applications. When you use the word "offensive" please direct it where it belongs. ;-)

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~garypriester">
Be it ever so humble...</a>