CompuServe Messages

>> Your 30% figure is a good one overall but can be misleading when you look closer at the target audience. I think if you counted MAC's in the pharmaceutical non-analytical R&D areas like synthesis, discovery, and other important areas of modeling, that MACs make up a much higher percentage. Mark, I think you are right about that specific subset of chemists, but I also think that the Autodesk people are trying to expand modeling beyond its traditional core base. And if the overall percentage is around 30%, but the core subset has a higher Mac percentage, than the percentage of Macs outside of the core is even lower than 30%. And the long range question for Autodesk is whether the Macs currently installed will be replaced by new Macs. You indicated that some of your users are moving up to SGIs — how do Indigo sales look from your perspective? And even ChemDraw is being ported to Windows — a significant step for CSC, which was the staunchest anti-IBM group I'd ever known. I don't know what a cross-platform product like Alchemy's sales have been like DOS vs. Mac. I suspect that the Mac version does sell better (Alchemy/Mac is also a better product than the DOS version, IMO). I think there's room for a good Mac modeler (is CAChe too expensive?), but I don't think that the future of the Mac is strong enough to make it a strategic platform. Mac fans would disagree. But if the Mac is not strategic long-term, Autodesk is probably too large to mess with it, even if you could make a couple of bucks in it. Rich P.S. Our 2-D drawing stuff can now act as a HyperChem front end for drawing (including DDE control) — just a plug… What's your geographic location?