Here today, Gone tomorrow

[victorf]

I have a commercial application that is powered by a MicroMint BCC52 controller. This app was designed and first built in 1988. For various practical reasons, the produce has not been built since 1996. The main reason being that some of the critical components have become obsolete. I have been asked many times in the past couple of years if I intended to
put the app back on the market. The scent of profit has had me working for the past 8 months or so to get a marketable product ready.

I am at the point where it is necessary to make a choice of controller. The BCC52 is still on the market. Micromint makes a replacement called the Domino which is smaller but is code compatible with the BCC52. This means that the code development done 15 years ago would be usable whichever of these two I might decide to use. However, the language - BASIC-52 is really a mess to work with and the world has moved on to using a more structured approach to code development. This allows us to build better code that is very maintainable. Both of these producets are pricey! The Domino is around $100 and the BCC52 is closing in on $200.

I have been looking at the ZBasic system and the BasicX system. I have some non-commercial experience with the BX-24 and I have plenty of experience with software development using Visual Basic. From the viewpoint of my app, there are a couple of problems with either system, but they can be worked around.


This brings me to the crux of this post. It is obvious that the BCC52 and the Domino have longevity in the market place. What can be said about the ZX-24 and/or the BX-24? Will I be able to count on either/both being around for,say, 10 years? I know that an absolute answer is not forthcoming, but given the reasonable longevity of the BX-24 it is reasonable to assume that these products might well have "legs". Any comments?

BTW: I asked this question on the BX-24 forum and had NO takers.

Any enlightenment will be appreciated.

Vic

[DH*]

NetMedia has many other products besides the BX-24. IIRC Netmedia was founded by the guy who was also the brains behind Artisoft Lantastic and he was once very "hands on", designing the BX-24 himself. Of course, nothing prevents them from discontinuing the BX-24 tomorrow. They really haven't done much to improve it lately.

[dkinzer]

[victorf]

Don,

I appreciate your candor

My product will never be sold in large quantities. I sell to a narrow niche
market. It is high priced and low volume. The evidence is that I can sell enough units per year to make a modest profit and the demand should be consistant for many years. I don't believe an OEM agreement is useful in my case.

I am in the process of arranging the system to have some immunity from obsolesence by heavy modularation so that I can design around the loss of a component without major disruption.

Judging strictly from the number of posts to your forums I suspect that the ZBasic controller is too new to have found a major following yet. I must confess that I like what I have seen so far to the point of designing one of my system's PCBs around it. I appreciate the structured programming capability. I am basically a software guy struggling with the hardware side a bit. Keep up the good work!

Vic