here's the thing that tips the scale

[Sherwood Botsford]

Hi Bowerbird

I'll confess I missed the whole vote thing.  A bunch of messages were
rambling on and on, and after a few paragraphs I hit the 'next
message' key.

Back when Steve Jobs ran NeXT he said something like:

"People won't change technologies for a 20% increase in productivity.
They won't change for even 100%.  They will change for 500%"

In practice you see this all the time.

BetaMax was the 20% better technology.  But VHS got the lead, and it
wasn't worth converting.

Digital Nikons were around for years before I switched.  That switch
was hastened when I drowned my 8008 on a canoe trip.  But it was close
to the 500% better when it happened.

Lots of new construction methods out there, but they aren't enough
better to make it worth while for builders to jump through the extra
hoops with the building inspectors.


In contrast here's a ray of light:

Apple needed to abandon the Power PC chip and move to Intel.  It was
much cheaper, it was faster, and it had a growth path.  To make this
work for their customers:

1.  They ported the OS to the new system.
2.  They put out a compiler tool chain that would build universal binaries.
3.  They built in a PowerPC emulator to support older programs.
4.  They maintained backward compatibility for the next 4 releases of the OS.


If you have a better mousetrap I would suggest:

1.  It has to have legacy support for standard markdown (Pick your standard....)
or
    It has to have a very good converter for MMD to BMD (Bowerbird mark down)

2.  Build a web page.  On that web page:
a.  There is a page with the full syntax of BMD done in the tutorial
style of  John Gruber's page. Syntax differences from MMD are
highlighted in skyblue pink.
b.  There is a page showing the desired output coded as standard MMD
and as BMD so that people have a large size sample to work with and
look at.
c.  There is a discussion forum on that page for talking about BMD.
Ideally there is a port so that discussions there also come to this
list, but not all MMD users are on this list.

Respectfully,

Sherwood of Sherwood's Forests

Sherwood Botsford
Sherwood's Forests --  http://Sherwoods-Forests.com
780-848-2548
50042 Range Rd 31
Warburg, Alberta T0C 2T0