In virtually all cases, professors tell students to download the free or "community" version of Microsoft's Visual Studio with VB.Net. But Visual Studio is a monster. The smallest download is a gigabyte, and it requires a powerful CPU. And while the IDE is polished and sophisticated, the .Net object model is very complex. Even professionals find it hard to learn. There are additional shortcomings. Whether they like it or not, professors wind up having to support Visual Studio if the students run into problems installing it, which at least a couple of students per class always wind up having.
These professors and students would be much better off using PureBasic because
- The download is much smaller
- The system requirements are much lower
- The learning curve is flatter
- The students won't be so frustrated
- The professors won't have to do so much support work
- It is much cheaper
But it's no problem!
The wonderful thing about software is that its marginal cost is basically zero. To make two automobiles cost twice as much as making one automobile, but making two copies of a file doesn't cost any more than making one copy of the file. And prices are funny things.
The founder of GoDaddy is Bob Parsons, but I knew about Bob Parsons back in 1980, when he was an accountant with a job he hated. At nights, he coded a program called MoneyCounts. These were the days of MS-DOS, and there was no GUI. The program was ugly but it worked. He tried to sell it for $89.95 and failed. He spent half his money on advertising, and not one sale. He lowered the price to $29.95 and spent the rest of the his money on advertising. He sold thousands and thousands of units and became a millionaire. The secret was to find the right price.
I think pricing PureBasic in the USD 15±5 range would make it very easy to sell to university students, especially if it included a "How to Program" manual. This would require contacting professors and making the sales call, but consider the potential.
In the USA alone, every one of the 50 states has two publicly-funded university systems. Small states have only one location, but the largest states have ten or more. On average, it's about three per state, or 150 total. In every location, there will be at least two of these basic programming courses, each with about 30 students. So the total market is 150 x 2 x 30 = 9,000 students per semester (half-year), or 18,000 students per year. At 100% and $15 each, that's $270,000 sales per year.
Obviously, 100% is a maximum that cannot be achieved, but you can use it to calculate other situations. Suppose you capture only 10% of the student market. That is still $27,000 income per year (and 2,700 more people who know about PureBasic). I do not say it's easy, but I think this could increase PureBasic's visibility.
