[MV] Re: Fwd: Voice Activation

[Chuck Rogers]

Steph (and everyone else):

The amount of work involved would be tremendous. Dragon originally  
announced their intention to bring NaturallySpeaking over to Mac OS X  
and then abandoned the project before even getting to the beta stage  
due to a). the amount of work involved; and b). the relatively low  
return on investment.

Think of it this way: imagine you have two makes of cars in the  
world, and only two. There is a model that will travel on any surface  
street or state highway, but can't go on Interstates and freeways.  
We'll call this the Microsoft car. Then you have a really cool car  
that runs super fast, and hardly ever breaks down, and is a lot  
easier to use, but it only runs on Internstates and freeways, no  
surface streets or state highways. This is called the Apple.

Everyone wants the Apple, but most don't buy it because they don't  
think it will get them where they want to go. So they buy the  
Microsoft car. In fact, over 90% of the cars made are Microsoft cars.  
OK, along comes a third party that makes parts for cars. They make  
this super-cool add on that allows the car to get 100 miles per  
gallon instead of 20. The problem is, the two cars are engineered so  
differently that it would require about the same amount of effort to  
make one for the Apple car as it would for the Microsoft car. In  
addition to that, it would virtually double the company's overhead,  
since to be successful they would have to hire new engineers that new  
how to build parts for the Apple (they already have tons of Microsoft  
engineers), new marketing people, since those who buy Apples cars  
think differently from those who buy Microsoft cars, and new support  
people, since the way things are implemented on the Apple side of  
things are so much different.

All of the sudden, the Apple car company says they are going to buy  
their parts from the same company that makes parts for most of the  
Microsoft cars. So the picture looks brighter, right? Nope. They are  
in the same boat, with the same amount of work to do because the  
Apple car company has a special way that all those parts work  
together. So while the performance of the Apple cars may go up, and  
the relative cost may go down due to economies of scale for the parts  
themselves, the amount of work necessary for the parts manufacturer  
to integrate his stuff into the car doesn't change.

OK - so with that general analogy, I hope you can see the problem.  
Over 9 out of every 10 speech recognition packages sold on Windows  
are some version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. If it were less - say  
they sold even 50% - they might see a benefit from doing a Mac  
product. But maintaining 90% of the market share on the Windows side  
takes a lot of work, so they view the Macintosh opportunity as a  
diversion, where we at MacSpeech live or die by our software.  
Fortunately, we must be doing something right, since the reviews  
lately have been pretty good.

Steph, I know how badly you want French - and we want to provide it  
just as badly. But until we find a workaround for our current  
technical issues, it just ain't gonna happen.




Best Regards,

Chuck Rogers, Chief Evangelist
MacSpeech, Inc.