Edcompcon sees bright future in educational software

Torrey Byles, Contributing Editor Educational software publishing promises to be a billion dollar industry in less than three years, but today the market is saturated with too many suppliers, and the negligible profit margins are restricting investment in further development, according to speakers at Edcompcon in San Jose, November 8-10. Educational packages "are multiplying like mice in a barn," said Jeff Locke, vice president of Bell and Howell's Interactive Communications Division, a publisher of software. The development opportunities in educational software are much greater than in utility or game software, Locke pointed out, because the subject matter is more diverse and after sales customer service is less. But the proliferation of software writers, along with the difficulty of informing the consumer what the product does, have made the business of selling software a hard one. Selling educational software is not as easy as selling textbooks. For a given courseware product, a school district is likely to buy only one per school. With textbooks they will buy one per student. Also, courseware is a "hidden" product: the buyer finds it difficult to know what he is buying. The buyer must rely on outside magazine reviews, word of mouth, demo diskettes or product trial periods. For the software publisher, the first two are hard to control and the second two are costly. As an example of one way to approach the problem, Locke outlined his company's Professional Authoring Software System, an Apple-based authoring language that enables non-programmers to write interactive computer-aided-insttuction courseware. Normally licensed to industrial trainers for $15,000, Bell and Howell is offering it free to authors in the academic community to write courseware in their content areas. The company provides editing and additional programming assistance, and ultimately will pay the author a 15 percent royalty on net sales of the final package. Another speaker, Debbie Dennis, marketing director for MacGraw-Hill's college division, supported Locke's remarks by estimating that today's market for college courseware alone is $150 million. Having recently purchased EMS of Minnesota and another software house in Arizona, MacGraw-Hill is positioning itself to be a major player in electronic publishing, she said.