I have to agree with Mike on several points. Both the Macintosh and Adobe communities have expressed outrage at Adobe's new licensing policy, which is just a logical extension of corporate greed. Which will indeed create an opening, which I really hope Xara can fill.

It's all about marketing, period, forget the false sense of security in the ivy covered walls of pure academia and research. Xara has the goods, now it's time for a successful marketing strategy. Does everyone realize how Illustrator became the #1 vector drawing program? More than 10 years ago, CorelDRAW had almost 90% of the Windows market for vector drawing programs. They stumbled as their CEO had some dirty deal accusations to answer for, and never regained to this day the momentum they had. Adobe, on the other hand, at the same time, saw 54% of their Photoshop revenue coming from Windows, and decided to give a truly anemic Windows Illustrator some serious attention. Since 1996 or so, Illustrator has been basically equivlant on both the Mac and the PC for features, and the company is so serious about the product they recast the code a few years ago to get rid of legacy code crap.

I'd like to see Xara taught in higher education, like Illustrator is, and CorelDRAW isn't these days. That was one monumentally sound move that Adobe wangled: to get courses taught in Illustrator at universities. Because this creates generations of users.

A good place to start with this might be to request a course in Xara at Lynda.com, no? If enough people ask for something, eventually smart merchants get the idea.

My Best,

gary