mhollowa at epo.som.sunysb.edu writes:
>Software ideas? Here's a novel idea. Affordable. When will anyone wake
>up and see that there is a vast market out there as the research budget
>shrinks. Every year there are more struggling labs that can't afford
>Macs, workstations or $1000 analysis packages. However, they do have a
>386 sitting around somewhere that is presently being used primarily to
>play games, and they can afford a nice little $100 Windows program that
>can help them put together a sequencing project. Everyone's still
>shooting for the ever shrinking number of labs that can afford to throw
>money around. That's incredibly short sighted.
There is a simple reason why software for doing DNA sequence analysis
is so much more expensive than say Microsoft Word, or Lotus 123. That
reason is that the market for DNA software (read copies to be sold) is
tiny compared to to the market for a word processor. Having seen
both sides of this issue, I can honestly say that the high price
of software is not that these companies are "raking in profits", but
that in order to get more money out than they invest, this is just
what they have to sell it for. You can't cut prices ten fold if you
will only sell five fold as many copies.
There are many freely distributed packages, and I suggest that you
might want to look into one of those. Or better yet, learn a bit
of programming. You might be surprised how much you can get done
in your spare time.
Steven Smith
Millipore Imaging systems
Disclaimer: My views, not Millipore's
