The Seattle Magic User's Group had an excellent meeting. The meeting was hosted by Best Consulting, in their beautiful Kirkland offices, courtesy of Charles Elledge.

Alan Zwiren, Vice President of Marketing for Magic Software in Irvine, flew in to talk to the group. He treated everyone to lunch -- a nice feast from the Olive Garden -- and gave away a 'magic' coin changer that turns a penny into a dime: and easy way to 'Make Money with Magic'.

There was also a great door prize -- a $100 traveler's check -- which was won by Gene Zuniga of Toray Composites.

Alan talked about the 'new direction' of MSE. Some real changes are either in the works or being discussed. Tool vendors in general have not been doing well financially, he said. Part of the reason for this is that companies don't want to just buy tools, they want to buy products.

So part of MSE's new strategy is to sell applications. EMerchant is their first offering. It is a vendor-to-vendor Internet sales application that is designed to be hooked into existing databases. It has a very specific market, and is doing well in that market.

Another part of MSE's strategy is in acquisitions. They bought a major distributor in Japan, which has worked out very well.

Alan said that in this new strategy, the Magic Community becomes even more important, and part of his goal is to change the attitude of 'love the product, hate the company' around to 'love the product, love the company'. There is talk of changing the pricing of Magic. One possibility is, instead of charging for runtimes, to do a type of revenue sharing with the developers. A developer could develop a product, and distribute as many copies as needed, and pay Magic a percentage of the developed product.

This page was last revised on April 23, 2000