Be Developers' Conference Approaching the Market Dave Johnson

MAKING MONEY

Dave Johnson: I'd like to welcome you all to the session on approaching the market. What I'm going to talk about today is something different from what people have been talking about. I'm going to talk about making money. Now, I know many of you have questions about why you'd want to do that and we're going to take those questions up in the question and answer period, so hold your questions for that.

First thing I want to do, I was just having a talk with these guys from Be Depot and one thing I want to talk about before I start is that as of yesterday the Be Operating System is for sale, and we're beginning to foster an environment where people have the expectation that software will be paid for and I know that's good news. CUSTOMERS EXIST

I also want to let you know that it looks like the market exists. In the last several weeks we've been averaging around 18,000 downloads a week from BeWare. That means right now a lot of people are actually picking up the BeOS, trying it out to the point where they're actually trying out software, and that's in the Mac market. So I think things are going to get very exciting for all of us in the next several months. BeOS ADVANTAGES

As you enter the BeOS marketplace you have several advantages. The first advantage is the technical advantage and that's what the rest of this conference has been discussing. I'm going to go over several other aspects of being in the Be marketplace that haven't been discussed and that I think are pretty interesting.

First of all, we're delivering you software-hungry customers. The way that we created the Be Operating System is that we threw out the past, we threw out layers and decades of old code and as a result of getting rid of legacy code, we don't have any legacy code. That's what we call an opportunity. The green field effect is what we call it. This is where you have a images pasture with no other species occupying the pasture in your marketplace. FRESH SHOT, LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

Because we're now in the Mac market and in the Intel market, this gives you a fresh shot at the entire customer base that you're trying to sell to now, but without any major competition sitting there yet.

Now, we all know that the first in the market is always the hardest to dislodge, so I want you all to think about that; that in your target market you have a fresh shot at the customers you're trying to sell to right now. It's a level playing field and there's an awful lot of opportunity in the Be marketplace.

The main thing I want to talk about today that's different from what you've experienced in the past in the Mac or the Windows marketplace, is a different business model and that is that Be is connected electronically to their customers. BORN OF THE WEB

Be is born of the web. We've really come to our existence since the web came into being. We center our marketing effort on the web; in fact, we really only have one brochure right now that's printed, so you find everything on the web. And what's significant is when you install the Be Operating System -- one of the only Icons you see is the "Welcome To BeOS" document, which you double-click and which immediately takes you to the Be web site. EASIER TO SPREAD THE WORD

Also from the Be web site the other thing that is interesting in that document is that it takes you to BeWare. Now, for those of you don't know what BeWare is let me explain.

BeWare is a place on the Be web site where you, registered developers, maintain information and demos about your own products. You maintain it yourself and your product is listed in BeWare by category, for example, under productivity, then under spreadsheet.

So the customer finds Be and is connected to Be, the customer finds BeWare, the customer finds your part of BeWare and then on BeWare there's also a link to your web page.

This is a new kind of a business model. The reason this is significant is because for software companies your base line marketing effort, your base line communication effort with the customers out there, is finding them and letting them know you exist at all.

I used to be in the direct mail business and we would spend just vast sums, and vast amounts of our effort went into just acquiring customers, finding mailing lists we can use to try to reach customers, just to let them know we exist, just to let them know "hey, there's a product out there that does this."

If you enter the Be marketplace, though, all of the customers, or most customers, are going to find BeWare. The customers interested in your category of software, they're going to find your category, they're going to see your name. They're going to see you listed with everybody playing in the field. So your underlying effort then is covered by Be, and this is a new kind of business model where you're going into the market to differentiate yourself, rather than just to get your name known, get your products known to the customer.

It's still up to you to market your product, to differentiate it - you'll still be wanting to place ads to position your product. You'll be continuing to make the effort to get press, get comparative reviews, but as I said, your underlying effort is covered by BeWare. NEWSLETTERS

Also, the connectiveness extends to Be's connectiveness to customer. For example, we have newsletters and you're probably familiar with the weekly newsletter. But you've started noticing now, if you're developers, that you're getting a monthly developer letter. What this means is -- what this shows is that we're going to start splitting off the developer news from the customer news. These customer newsletters will be opportunities for you to be talked about or we have -- we don't have it actually set up, but it will be an opportunity one way or another for you to get information to the customers. NEWS GROUPS

Another place that the connectiveness enters in is usenet news groups and there's several of them out there now, at comp.sys.be.xxxxx. I strongly urge all of you to go get active on these usenet news groups because, first of all, you want to get familiar with who's out there, what they're saying. It gives you an opportunity to answer customer questions. On the .announce news group you can announce product information and that's a very visible worldwide place to be connected with your customers. USER GROUPS

Another thing that we've got is an effort to work with user groups and if you didn't know, we already have over 70 user groups, Be user groups around the world. You can contact these user groups electronically. They are all listed on our web site, so go check them out.

User groups are an opportunity to demonstrate your product, to get product information out. Contact them, arrange to show up in demo and the other thing you can do is there's a lot of them are just interested in you send them a script and a demo and they'll do it for you. So we've got a very active user group community and it's growing fast. E-MAIL MAIL LISTS

There's several E-mail mailing lists that are managed through Be, various types and I invite you to go check those out, get involved on those. Some of them are Be_info_out only, some of them are two-way interactive and you can get digests of a lot of them so you don't wind up having a whole lot of mail showing up. So I strongly encourage that. BE NEWS WEB SITES

One of the best things you can do is get in touch with the Be news sites. There's BeLeadingEdge, there's BeOSCentral, BeHive. There's several of them and we have listings of them available on our web site.

These news sites, just like how we have software-hungry customers, well, we have news-hungry news sites and an awful lot of people who are involved with the Be marketplace right now check these news sites. Establishing a relationship with these news sites is like establishing a relationship with their readers.

What I'm talking about is a number of ways that the connectiveness of Be electronically brings you advantages reaching your customers and this can greatly lower your marketing costs.

Also, because of the electronic connective nature of Be there's lower sales costs involved. We're going to have a demonstration of Be Depot in just a moment and I want to talk about Be Depot. BE DEPOT

Be Depot is a hassle-free, convenient, easy way to market your software. You package it up, you send it to them, you put together some marketing materials and they'll help you quite a bit.

Most Be customers are going to be showing up there to look at what's available, and what I really want to encourage is those of you who are marketing ShareWare right now, I want to encourage you to think about turning those products commercial and selling them through BeWare.

It's been very difficult to market software and it's not difficult on the Be, so ShareWare evolved as a way to kind of, oh, I wrote this, I don't know a lot about marketing software, I don't want to do boxing and stuff, I'll put this out there and people can send me $10 if they want to.

Well, instead get a demo out there, send people BeWare, BeWare can collect credit cards, BeWare can take orders. You can sit back and BeWare can send you checks. Excuse me, Be Depot. Excuse me.

People will be visiting your web sites because of BeWare and so one way or another I want to encourage you strongly to get a way to order your products. Very good way is to send them to Be Depot. Another way is if you don't take credit cards yourself, that's the most important way, of course, is taking credit cards. There's a lot of web hosting services, one of them I know well, because he was my neighbor, WebCom, they take credit cards now. They have a service where it's transparent, where if people want to order your product you have order forms, they take your credit card. WebCom will handle everything for you. BE DEPOT DEMO

I guess it's a good time to do the Be Depot demo. I'd like to introduce Michael MacBride, vice president of sales and marketing for Be Depot.

Michael MacBride: Thank you, Dave. I'm the vice president of sales and marketing at Star Code Software and we have a complete marketing and sales and distribution solution for developers that pretty much from the time you finish an application to the time it's on the end-user's PC. We handle everything in between and we do that with two software packages and an on-line service.

The two software packages are Package Builder, which is an installer maker, which makes installers for Software Valet, and Software Valet, which is the software management and downward utility, which ships with every copy of the BeOS.

And in between those we have bedepot.com which is our on-line distribution sales and service and we handle everything from giving you a product page in our catalog, shipping your software electronically. We take credit cards and process all of the orders with the bank, pay taxes worldwide. We handle all of the fraud checking, we assume fraud liability, so every single copy of your software that ships you get paid for and we collect registration automatically through Software Valet.

And we also provide free updates for all of your software that you sell through Be Depot, so whenever an end-user has a copy of your software, Software Valet will automatically check our server so wherever you put up an update they will automatically be notified and be able to download the software to your update. This helps to keep you current with all of your software, so I guess without further ado, I will introduce Michael Klingbeil, who is in charge of our engineering code at Star Code and he will walk you through Be Depot.

Michael Klingbeil: Okay. So let me begin by bringing up the Be Depot web site. So one of the things that we've been working on is updating this site. We have very flexible product catalogs supporting multiple categories. We support, you know, searching the catalog. Basically all the features that you would expect from a full-featured Internet software provider.

Let me just cruise through here. So one of the things that's nice, we have on here our very complete product pages, so you can basically give us the information that you want displayed on your product page and we'll put that all on there. And we support a very flexible pricing and pricing model and we support displaying all the different versions of software that you might have, Power PC versions, Intel versions, different languages, arbitrary combinations of those and then the prices can be set individually for any of those.

We have shopping carts and we have a complete order process, real-time credit card processing. I'm not going to go through the whole -- the whole order process, but it's very easy for users to go ahead and purchase software.

The other thing we have also is support of FreeWare TrialWare software, so if you wanted to distribute TrialWare versions of your applications, you can do that as well.

So I'm going to go here and just grab a FreeWare product. This is Package Builder, our installer maker. Let me clarify the FreeWare on there. Currently now it's free for ShareWare and FreeWare developers. If you're doing a commercial product there is licensing for that and you can contact us for more information.

So if you want to go ahead and grab a FreeWare product and there's obviously -- enter in the appropriate information, we store this all and you can access this via the -- our developer Extra Net. So go ahead and do the Software Valet download. This does the downloading through Software Valet. One of the major advantages of that being that the download is fully resumable, so that if something bad happens during the download, there isn't any problem.

So, you know, this download has begun here. I can defer it, you know, whatever I'm doing or if that was, you know, a machine crashing, I can resume the download in the middle without any problem, so that's one of the things that's nice.

Software Valet is a client that communicates with our server and it's included free with every copy of the BeOS. It's on Intel, this Intel release as well. And so it not only handles downloading, but it includes installation, so it's the installation engine that works -- use Package Builder to create the installers, then Software Valet will install them. It's a pretty full-featured installer with most of the things that you would want.

So go ahead and just run a very quick installation. There's a preview of the files that are installed and replacement options.

Once the package is downloaded user is prompted for their registration information. So once they enter this information in it's saved as a preference so there's no need to retype this so this is checked in and this will be saved. I'll go ahead and register that. Now, in the future if a user wants to reregister or check for updates, they can do those activities.

So in the software manager you can view the software that's installed, I can check for updates, currently there are no updates available. And all of the update checking, we've done some work on that to support if there are multiple versions of updates available, different languages, different platforms available, all those are displayed in the update section.

So we have a really nice updating system and some of the other changes we've made in the latest version of Software Valet, functioning through fire walls properly and also supporting, obviously supporting greater variety of updates. And so it's really a complete solution for both users and then for developers. You get the software up on Be Depot and we send it out, selling it and Software Valet makes it easier for users to -- to do that -- to do that process. So that's it. Thank you. END BE DEPO DEMO

Dave Johnson: Thanks very much. So once again, I want to encourage you if you're running ShareWare or even FreeWare, think about Be Depot as a way to distribute your software instead, make some money.

Okay. Another BeOS advantage is that with this electronic model we have lower production costs. First of all, if you're shipping something electronically you don't have printing costs, you don't have to print a box, you don't have to pay for disks, you don't have to pay for disk duplication, you don't have to pay for reg cards, you don't have to pay for business reply postage, don't have to pay for inserts. So your production costs are lowered dramatically and if you're just distributing electronically, dramatically to zero.

Another advantage here with electronic distribution on this connectiveness model is that when you have a version update two things happen. One of them is you're in touch with the customer; the customer can just show up at your web site and get an updater which is very hassle-free.

The other thing that happens, though, is you're not throwing out inventory that's out there with a bad version. Boxes aren't sitting on the shelf six months later with that old bad version, people buy it, you get tech support calls, you have to send them an upgrade.

And also another nice thing about the electronic distribution model is that you can update your documents as you need to do, so every time something changes and you find a mistake or there's an FAQ or something that you need to update, you just update it and the next one you ship out has the fixes in it.

Further advantage of the electronic model is that you have lower support costs. First of all, one thing that I've seen some companies doing is their help buttons instead of bringing up the help dialogue, what they do instead is send a BMessage to NetPositive that tells NetPostive to open up a web page that the company has set up to handle support of the product. So on that web page will be current faxes, FAQs means frequently asked questions, and you can update the support pages you need to do.

For example, you start getting a whole bunch of E-mail that says hey, what's going on here and you're answering the same question 20, 30 times. Well, instead of this problem of when something sitting out on the shelf for six months and you're handling that question for six months, what you do is you just update the web page, the support page, add another question to the frequently asked questions. Suddenly all the E-mail and calls stops.

A second aspect of lowered support and costs is that due to the connectiveness, when you're handling everything over the Internet you're getting your support handled by E-mail instead of by phone. That helps quite a bit on time. It helps on personnel, helps on phone charges if you're doing 800 number phone support, and it also let's you handle international questions as you're available to answer the questions, instead of when the calls come in.

Actually, they covered part of what I was going to be talking about about installation issues with Package Builder.

One more advantage of being on the Be Operating System, at least for now, is that it's going to be a lot easier to get press. BeOS is new, it's exciting, people are interested in it and as I talked about in the beginning, you don't have a lot of competition yet. So as you bring your products to market, you'll find that it's going to be a lot easier to get press in this marketplace that you're in. It's not a crowded playing field.

I'm going to have an article coming up here soon, so watch the newsletter. It's going to be detailing getting press, how to contact people, how to write press releases. LOWER PRICES

So with these lower costs that I've been outlining, what you have is you have your costs are lower, you have the same images potential market, so you can have lower prices with a BeOS product with equivalent margins. You're not paying production costs, short costs, marketing costs are lower and the other things I've outlined. So you can price your product lower and if you price your product lower what that means is that your product can be priced lower than a competing product on Mac or Windows, which means you have the potential to sell more units.

And what you want to do is you want to establish customers now, because once again, with the electronic model as you come out with upgrades you're in touch with your customers, you should expect a much higher response rate electronically, so your continuing revenue can be greater.

I don't want to neglect the traditional channels, the distributor reseller markets, retail chains, especially the catalogs and I expected first the catalogs would be picking up the BeWare software into the Windows marketplace. In fact, some of you who are more aggressive I'd suggest contacting the catalogs and talking to them about carrying your BeOS software.

The retail distribution channels for the BeOS software, I know you've been going to Fry's and you've been going to Microcenter down the street and it's not there yet. I expect you'll be seeing that coming later on as we move more into a widerspread marketplace, where we're not talking about this is for geeks and enthusiasts only. That's coming very soon and you should start planning for it now. OEM BUNDLING

There's also hardware OEM bundling opportunities. As you know, right now we're bundled with UMax, so there's the potential for bundling opportunities.

I want to talk about our evangelism team. I know Frank covered that this morning. Write down everybody's E-mail. We're here to assist you getting your products to market. If you're thinking about a product, contact us, we'll talk to you about how to get it going. If you've got a product on your way, we can talk to you about how to get it finished. If you're getting ready to bring a product to market, we can talk to you about helping you with that. And if you're getting a product to market, we can help you with press and all kinds of other issues.

We're here to help you and if you contact us you'll be surprised at how much help we're willing to give you. So check these out and also Scott is handling video, scott@be.com, he's handling video.

I want to thank you for coming and open it up to questions and answers. I kind of condensed it a little bit because we threw in the demo. I'll open it up for questions.

A Speaker: Be Depot seems to blur somewhat the line between ShareWare and commercial, so I'm kind of curious, since this seems to be a pressing shift between the two, I'm kind of curious what the definition is?

Dave Johnson: I don't know if there's a different definition for ShareWare necessarily. I think a lot of the reasons for ShareWare was because it was so hard to get software distributed before.

A Speaker: Well, I mean you want --

Michael MacBride: I might be able to answer a little bit more clearly. The difference between commercial and ShareWare is that the end-user is not free to distribute your software, and so if someone is using your software they have paid for it first.

So the thing we encourage our developers to do is to offer TrialWare and the most common version of that is time-limited TrialWare, so people can try out your software. If they like it then they can come and buy it, but there aren't versions of your software out there floating around that people are using and you're hoping for some percentage of sales on that user base. You're actually getting a full sales percentage on every copy of your commercial software that's out there.

A Speaker: So in the case that I would have before today considered ShareWare where I have a version out there that is in some sense slightly annoying, whether it's because it's missing some feature or pops-up dialogue option or whatever, but once -- when the person actually goes and buys it, they either get a new version or they get a code that they can put into this thing that makes that annoyance go away. Do you consider that commercial or --

Michael MacBride: Well, commercial -- software that is well supported, ShareWare that is well supported is well supported ShareWare, but what you can do with that is you don't have a license that restricts you from distributing that. When you buy something from Be Depot you have a serial number and you have a license to use that product and you're a registered owner of that and you can get free updates if the developer offers it and you may also get discount upgrades.

A Speaker: The question of definition only comes up because you mentioned that the license and Package Builder is different for commercial business for ShareWare, that's why I was asking.

Michael MacBride: The licensing for Package Builder is if you sell your software through Be Depot, package is included for free. If you would like to sell your software through other channels besides Be Depot, you actually need to purchase a commercial license.

A Speaker: And then the other side of the question is do you handle issuing some sort of registration number or something like that?

Michael MacBride: Yes. What we do is we actually manage all of the information for you on our database and you have access to a database through your own web site, just for you as a developer. So you can log into that and you can view all of your registration information, you can run reports on registration for various products for various periods of time. You can look at sales reports, download reports and view your sales trend versus your trial rate.

A Speaker: Again, maybe I'm not asking the question quite clearly enough. Suppose that I have an application which I distribute in some slightly annoyed form and when the user uses Software Valet to go to you and gets the real thing, one option is that they download another megabyte of stuff from you. The other option is that all they really get from you is they give you a payment and you give them some number which they plug into the software and that enables the thing?

Michael MacBride: We do not have keys right now, no. You'll need to redownload the commercial version of the software.

A Speaker: Of course, you could download a small application, a file that is the key that --

Michael MacBride: You could do that and as a developer you could implement that pretty easy yourself.

A Speaker: Do you handle the serialization process (inaudible.)

Michael MacBride: He asked if we handled the serial number process and what we do is we can support any serial number system or scheme that you want. So if you have your own serial number system in place we can support that or we can just -- we can handle the serial numbers for you and what we do is every time we ship a piece of software, either the serial numbers that you gave us or our own generated serial numbers are appended to the file and the end-user gets that automatically entered in the Software Valet and they also get a receipt with their serial number it.

A Speaker: Download upgrades with product, are you redownloading the whole thing or downloading customer files or filing dips of the --

Dave Johnson: Are you talking about the model I'm talking about here? You probably would want to post an updater. You mean a free upgrade updater on your web site? Yeah, probably just want something that updates, yeah.

A Speaker: Does Package Builder support updating?

Michael Klingbeil: Package Builder does have a patch dipping system, but we currently don't really support that for the shipping of updates through Software Valet, the reason being that dips need to be applied to a specific version, so you'd need to create, depending on how many versions you create, you'd need to create dips for each version that somebody is potentially updating from.

So you could have five versions out there and then somebody wants to go to the next version, they would have to apply a sequence of dips, so there isn't really necessarily any savings then in terms of --

A Speaker: Marimba keeps publishing a program on their site they keep dips of all versions of published and (inaudible.)

Michael Klingbeil: I mean that's a nice idea. The thing about Marimba is that it plays in a nice contained area, because really essentially all they're dealing with is Java.

A Speaker: No, you can download (inaudible.)

Michael Klingbeil: I guess I wasn't aware of that. Yeah, we don't support that.

A Speaker: What do you get out of this?

Michael MacBride: The way our pricing scheme works is we have no up-front charges and no setup charges and we take a flat rate of 20 percent of sales, so you only pay for what you sell.

A Speaker: You had a line up there about bundling the OS?

Michael MacBride: We do have available BeOS bundles, but those are -- those are handled on an individual basis. If you want to bundle DOF contact Bart@be.com.

A Speaker: Will that work with Be Depot, also?

Michael MacBride: Be Depot currently does not sell the BeOS, but that may not or may not be available. Be Depot does support bundling of any of the products that we sell and so if you choose to get together with other vendors you can sell your products individually and in bundle prices.

A Speaker: If I'm going to sell something, that puts my code together probably BeOS that's in it as a package and can I put both --

Dave Johnson: That would probably be a CD product.

A Speaker: Does Be Depot support a subscription model, buy one, then you get several copies later over time?

Michael MacBride: We do support subscription models and you can set however many updates end-users will get and you can also change that after the fact. If you initially release a subscription and decide that you're going to give end-users three free versions after that and then eventually decide wow, I really should give them the fourth one free too, it's very easy to update the database and make sure that the right users get the right update.

A Speaker: How do you handle foreign exchange?

Michael MacBride: We handle foreign exchange by only taking orders from credit cards and so they're all processed in U.S. dollars. The foreign exchange is handled by your bank that handles your credit card.

A Speaker: You guys are going to be collecting an awfully images database with tracks to Be Applications database. Are you guys planning on selling that mailing list?

Michael MacBride: We have no plans to sell the mailing list.

A Speaker: Is that a policy that you're not or is that going to be a public posted --

Michael MacBride: That is a public and posted policy that we do. We also do not provide developers with personal information, beyond that which you decide to submit with your registration. So developers will know that there's a valid serial number when you buy a product, but the information they have about you is that which you submit when you register the product.

A Speaker: So you're not going to sell me BeatWare's customer mailing list?

Michael MacBride: I am not. I'm not going to sell you BeatWare's customer mailing list. And also, as a developer you will only have access to your registration files. You don't have access to any --

Dave Johnson: Coming from the direct mail business, I'm not sure you'd want that to be a policy. You'd want the customers to state whether they want to prevent that or not.

Michael MacBride: We thought about that a fair amount and right now it is our policy that we are not going to sell that.

A Speaker: Do you provide a way for me to contact my customers so when the customer registers he gives an E-mail address, for example, do you just send me that E-mail address as part of it or you don't send me that at all or is there a way that I can send out a piece of E-mail to all of my customers and say hey, version two is out blah, blah, blah?

Michael MacBride: The registration information is yours and you can access all of that information through your vendor Extra Net, so you log on and you can view registration reports and there's a particular report that's a mailing list report and you can have it export all of the E-mail addresses of your registered list of supplied E-mail addresses and all of our reports can all be downloaded as tab limited text files as well.

A Speaker: What is the set of required information for end-user...(inaudible.)

Michael MacBride: When you purchase software you actually have to enter all of your billing information that matches your credit card and that's required by the banks for authentication, your name and most of our developers do require E-mail address, and the reason they do that is because it gives them the opportunity to inform all of the end-users whenever there is an update.

(Inaudible question.)

Michael MacBride: No, you can't, so that downloads require that at least the minimum entry of your E-mail address.

Michael Klingbeil: It depends on different banks implement the address verification system differently. I believe the phone number is required. It's really a credit card processing issue, so it's possible that you might not enter a phone number and the credit card processing would go through or it might not.

Michael MacBride: One thing to mention about the purchase information is the purchase information is not considered registration information, so when you supply your address and your phone number when you're purchasing, that is just for the commerce portion of the transaction.

When you register that is when your information goes to the developer, so you can choose which portion of the information you'd like to.

A Speaker: Does the information transfer from the commerce portion to the registration information automatically?

Michael MacBride: All of the registration information is actually stored as a preference in Software Valet. So once you've entered your registration information it does remain and the fields that you usually like to have filled in will already be filled in.

A Speaker: What's the situation with security on the browsers right now?

Michael MacBride: The state of security on the browsers right now is SSL is supported on our site for all ordering, but we also provide a -- a, quote, "insecure" or "less secure" page for people using nonSObrowsers, like NetPositive does not support SSL.

So one thing we do support for people who prefer to use SSL, you can purchase the software on a platform that runs an SSL browser, but you do not have to download it at the time of purchase. You can then go to your Be machine and download the software from your Be machine.

A Speaker: How images is the active developer market at the moment; how images is the active customer market at the moment and what are its demographics?

Michael MacBride: I actually do not have detailed information.

Dave Johnson: As I say, we're averaging 18,000 downloads from BeWare per week.

A Speaker: Is that by site or anything like do you have information about how many sites that represents?

Dave Johnson: Those are individual files downloaded from BeWare.

A Speaker: That could be one person. I mean how many sites?

Dave Johnson: I don't -- we have the information, I don't have it with me.

A Speaker: Are you going to be making that information public?

Dave Johnson: I don't know, but that's obviously going to be growing as well. What specific kind of information do you want?

A Speaker: Well, for example, if I want to write an application, something that held a developer library, how images is my market?

Dave Johnson: Why don't you contact me? Actually, I'm handling evangelism for that specific thing and I would love to talk to you.

A Speaker: And obviously the same question about customers.

Dave Johnson: Come up afterwards.

A Speaker: PC Data provides retail sales figures for all of your competitors, they're a research firm.

Dave Johnson: Research firm?

A Speaker: Yeah, and if everything's being ordered on the web from Be Depot, how do I get sales numbers for my competitors?

Dave Johnson: Frank?

Frank Boosman: For those of you who haven't seen PC Data, what they do is they track certain percentageS which they know precisely what that percentage is of the U.S. marketplace and they can derive out data from that for unit and dollar shipments of the products across all categories of the software and you can subscribe to special -- and you're right, it is absolutely invaluable to have.

It's a great question. I hadn't thought about it until you brought it up. And now that I think about it, I don't know. That's something we will take up with the guys at Star Code and figure out some way of getting that information so that everybody's happy that developers have what they need, but they don't feel like their businesses are being exposed.

Russ McMahon: Yeah, one of the thing we're looking forward to is as there's more applications available to the platform, if it's possible to actually get a true picture of what's going on, but right now because of the lack of applications in some key market segments, you're really not seeing accurate portrayals of what's going on, there's not a complete picture.

So as there are more applications in given categories, so individual developers are less at risk of you knowing exactly what's going on in their business. I think you're going to see some stuff being done in that area.

A Speaker: Do you insist on exclusive distribution rights?

Russ McMahon: We definitely don't insist on exclusive -- one of the main things is BeOS is definitely trying to grow the market and the more customers you can get for your products, the merrier. That means more OS sales and that means a greater client base. So us trying to kind of guard the whole market really sort of hurts the Be market in the short run and the long run.

A Speaker: So what happens to Package Builder for the developer?

Russ McMahon: In the case where a developer is choosing to use additional channels aside from just Be Depot, it costs $399 to use Package Builder in those scenarios.

A Speaker: It's a one-time license?

Russ McMahon: It's a one-time license, just like buying any other product. If you want to upgrade later on, you can upgrade later on, but --

Michael MacBride: And one other thing that we do offer is if you do sell your software through Be Depot, it is possible for us to handle registrations and updates for the software that you do sell through other channels. So if you sell the software on CD or through another ESD service or off of your own site, we at Be still can support registration collection and updates for those packages.

Russ McMahon: The key there being serial numbers, so you must generate your own serial numbers in those cases and you must alert us that those are serial numbers that we should be collecting registration and shipping updates to, so we're not shipping stuff out to people who we shouldn't be shipping stuff out to.

Dave Johnson: More questions? Yes.

A Speaker: One of the topics that's been discussed a bit today is international market and somewhere people were talking about localization and so forth.

Do you guys -- well, this is for both of you, because I think Be's web site is almost entirely English.

Dave Johnson: We also have other languages, we have Be Europe and others.

A Speaker: Do you? I somehow hadn't seen those. I guess the question is for people who don't speak English.

Dave Johnson: Frank, he wants to know issues for selling to people who don't speak English and I'm sure Be Depot has some answers.

Frank Boosman: Sure. The biggest issue -- the first issue's localization and Be Europe can certainly help you with that.

We can also help you with data on the relative sizes of the various markets, so that you can know where it's going to make sense for you to localize your product. The other big issue that you're obviously going to face is going to be support and there are -- there are turnkey systems for support, in fact, we use them at Be.

We use Stream in the United States from Xytel in Europe, so although we take all of our developer support calls directly, all of our customer support calls go through off-site support center firms which are much more efficient, much more cost effective for us.

And that's another thing that we know that we need to help explain to developers, how to take advantage of those as more and more commercial apps start rolling out to market. I think if you combine -- if you combine working with a service like Be Depot to actually electronically deliver your product and you work with off-site customer support, then at that point you're just collecting checks, which is a pretty nice situation to be in.

Russ McMahon: Be Depot actually can handle the language issue pretty well. If you go to any products page, they'll say more versions available. So we can actually sell more versions to different markets, depending on their language.

The real main thing we once again feel the market's not big enough we haven't been able to get good enough numbers so far, whether it really is Germany or France or Japan that actually is bigger than the rest, because you really want to tackle them one at a time, convert the entire web site support all the way through the system.

A Speaker: I guess part of the question is that when we're dealing with a highly technical market, there's a pretty good chance that people will have sufficient knowledge of English or I could -- I don't speak Dutch, but I feel confident that if I hit a Dutch web site that I could navigate my way through pay per product, but I have a hunch that my mother, for example, would not feel so comfortable with that.

The other way is true, that while Americans like to think that everyone in the world speaks English, it's not really true. An English web page, even if it's only asking for credit card information that is completely clear, no matter what language it's in, is going to scare away customers?

Russ McMahon: We're going to take our lead from the developers. If we get some Japanese developers who start selling Japanese products, then obviously we've got to make the order process in Japanese and so on. And BeatWare has expressed interest in moving more into the European languages and as they go there we have been very supportive of them going there. So we don't want to kind of drive the market down one language route when there's really not any language, any software being sold for those languages today.

(Inaudible question.)

Russ McMahon: The question had to do with not using credit cards and I think we're trying to wrap it up here, so after we're done here, we can talk about that.

Dave Johnson: Thanks a lot for attending and thanks for attending the conference.

(Session concluded.)