Fellow Derivers,

     As many of you might be, I am distressed by the recent news of the
buyout.  I suspect that one of two things will happen:  TI will attempt to
go head-to-head with Mathematica and the like or it will try to find new
customers for the existing products.
     If TI tries to go up against Mathematica it will have to make major
changes in Derive.  There will be no guarantee of a successful competition.
Even if TI is successful, most of us will lose the simple utility that we,
or at least I, have come to appreciate so much.  If TI is unsuccessful then
Derive will either be allowed to die or it will be sold off to a competitor
(Mathematica!), who will kill it outright, or a smaller company that will be
in no position to care for it and may eventually let it die or sell it off
again.  In any case, I suspect that Derive will be absorbed all or in part
by a larger competitor and cease to exist.  (With apologies for any factual
mistakes to the principals involved, I would like to relate a similar
experience with a software application called GRAFTOOL.  GRAFTOOL was a
simple DOS based graphics package available many years ago.  It wasn't
particularly pretty but it was very good at doing certain things such as 3D,
surface, contour and other specialty graphs.  I was quite happy with it for
many years.  A few years ago, when trying to locate a newer version, I found
that it had been passed around to a couple of different owners and then it
just faded away.  Perhaps parts of it were used or rewritten for other
applications but its simple, concise functionality was gone, certainly
within one single cost effective package.  Luckily my old DOS version is
still usable.)
     Should TI try to keep Derive in its current market niche, it will
probably have to find many more customers.  The large corporation mentality
will expect more than small company/product performance or it will see no
future in Derive.  Unfortunately, that philosophy will lead us back into the
first scenario where Derive is allowed to die off or is sold to a
competitor.
     As you can tell, I am pessimistic about this turn of events.  We will
know the fate of Derive when we see its first TI version.  I may buy the
last real "Soft Warehouse" version of Derive hoping it will be useful for a
very long time as desktop platforms evolve.


Regards,

Joe Frisbee

United Space Alliance, USH-483L
600 Gemini
Houston, TX  77058

WkPh      281.282.2816
WkFax    281.282.3153
email       [log in to unmask]


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