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MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

mackichan.com

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Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#21

Post by lowercased »

scrdhrt wrote: post #14
airbreather wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?

My father (67, retired) has a couple of friends his age with long time, small businesses in the IT industry. One has been making some sort of map software for a very small niche in the marine industry, another has been making software for bee keepers or something similar. A third in image scanning software. They have been doing well since the late 80s, and still could be. They chose to go out of business and enjoy re…

> I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on.

It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a few reasons.

In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it.

The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts, and not all will want to switch to some 'newcomer'.

Many of these smaller business reliant on niche software will go out of business themselves, or be acquired by larger companies that will replace the niche software and process with something else.

The current customers may not actually want anything other than regular updates while paying minimal support/maintenance contracts. Someone established can live off that, but someone new will have to spend a lot of time learning, and the income may not be sufficient to justify all the learning.

I worked on a project in 2018 where some of the (small) company was still running on a combination of foxpro/db2, with a bunch of custom code by an indie/solo vendor who had 'retired' probably 5 years earlier. He'd 'sold' the company to another individual who ... kept it going, but couldn't easily deal with new needs (new reports, etc). Another vendor did an upgrade on the hosting server, and nothing worked after that. The upgrade was a base NT upgrade, and there wasn't any easy way to 'go back' quickly. Things ran off an RDP session to a laptop in Canada running some weird trial emulation tool under windows 7 (this was how it was translated to me from various parties).

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#22

Post by deregulateMed »

tibbetts wrote: post #12
asah wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not sell the business? too much hassle to operate? someone surely would want it...

One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and d…

I relate to this. 1 person company means getting the job done. As soon as you have 2 people you really need 3. One to do the labor, the other to schedule and bill(receptionist). If it's a physical company you need more space. Some software charges by person too.

If something gets cancelled, the 1 person company takes a few hours off. Your 3 person company still needs to get their weekly paychecks.

Whenever I hear calls for raises to minimum wage to absurd(?) levels (20$/hr), I think that this company will never be able to grow past 1 person. You can pay for a receptionist if you are a big corp with many employees, but it's really hard when you are going from 1 person to 3. We'd even let the receptionist do full WFH and just answer phones so they can watch their kids.

"I guess we don't deserve to be in business".

And the big corporation who gives 60% of our service conquers the industry.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#23

Post by aynyc »

tibbetts wrote: post #12
asah wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not sell the business? too much hassle to operate? someone surely would want it...

One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and d…

People buy restaurants and car shops mainly because of licensing such as alcohol and zoning laws. It's rare for a specialty shop to be sold unless the owner has an apprentice.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#25

Post by mr_gibbins »

amichail wrote: post #3

Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html

I doubt it, since in academia there are two gods, Word and LaTeX. It is very rare to find journals/conferences who don't specify one template or the other (with the possible exception of ACM, who are a law unto themselves). TexMacs might be OK for final preparation of camera-ready PDFs but by that point you're already invested in Word/LaTeX so there's no point switching typesetter.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#27

Post by quietbritishjim »

amichail wrote: post #3

Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html

It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it really has no connection to TeX (except the ability to typeset mathematics).

Another alternative is LyX, which actually does use LaTeX. Even that is not really a "LaTeX editor" though: it produces/exports excellent LaTeX, and uses that for typesetting, but does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX (as the developers freely admit). Depending on your situation that may or may not be a problem: if you just have to give a journal the final result in LaTeX then you can use LyX to produce it, but if you want to collarboratively work on a paper with someone else who wants to use raw LaTeX then it wouldn't be suitable. I wrote my masters thesis, course notes, and PhD thesis in LyX and would strongly recommend it - although it's a GUI I would argue it has a stronger learning curve than raw LaTeX, but leaves you more productive in the end.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#29

Post by amichail »

mr_gibbins wrote: post #25
amichail wrote: post #3

Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html

I doubt it, since in academia there are two gods, Word and LaTeX. It is very rare to find journals/conferences who don't specify one template or the other (with the possible exception of ACM, who are a law unto themselves). TexMacs might be OK for final preparation of camera-ready PDFs but by that point you're already invested in Word/LaTeX so there's no point switching typesetter.

TeXmacs is better than Word for documents containing math.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#30

Post by GiovanniP »

mr_gibbins wrote: post #25
amichail wrote: post #3

Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html

I doubt it, since in academia there are two gods, Word and LaTeX. It is very rare to find journals/conferences who don't specify one template or the other (with the possible exception of ACM, who are a law unto themselves). TexMacs might be OK for final preparation of camera-ready PDFs but by that point you're already invested in Word/LaTeX so there's no point switching typesetter.

It will take a bit.

I think that there are good points in switching document preparation system. Differently from LaTeX, TeXmacs can be programmed in a sensible way (it uses Scheme), and differently from Word you have access to the source. It is superior enough to both systems that the future standard will work according to the ideas implemented in it, I think.

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