Ana:
Concerning the questions you raised in your second paragraph, there is a lot of room for conjecture. As a person who has an MBA (Arizona State University, 1990), I'll make the following predictions about what the future may hold for JFW and Window-Eyes based upon what has happened with products in buyouts and mergers within the sighted community in the past.
A couple of words of caution are necessary before I begin. First, these are only my predictions based on what has occurred in the past in different industries and businesses, and I could be completely wrong on any or all accounts. Second, any changes in the offing will not happen right away. Current VFO management will wait until the talk has died down (and they've completed their market research) before making any moves. With that said, here's what I think will happen.
1) Either JAWS or Window-Eyes will be discontinued. From a business standpoint, there is absolutely no reason to have two competing product lines marketed at the same relatively small population. My gut feeling is that Window-Eyes will be the product that will be shown the door (Ai Square was bought out and not the other way around), but that feeling is tempered by the fact that Window-Eyes and not JAWS has the contract with Microsoft for delivery with shipments of Office products.
2) The price for whichever screenreader is left standing will rise. However, that price rise may not be as big (at least initially) as some may fear. The reasons? The availability of both the free NVDA and the current push by Microsoft (as a response to Apple's VoiceOver) to make Narrator more user-friendly. Also, the rise of the price of whatever screenreader is left standing will be tempered because state rehabilitation agencies and not individual blind people make the majority of screenreader purchases and because these agencies are operating with tighter budget restrictions.
3) Expect many employees of AI Square to lose their jobs. Businesses do not buy out (or even merge with) other businesses to double payrolls. If anything, they hope to gain economies of scale and create greater worth for their stockholders by reducing, at least somewhat, the number of people working at the combined company. This statement would be true even if both WindowEyes and JAWS were continued as separate product lines. The first to go will be AI Square management (remember who bought out whom), and that will be followed by members of the purchased company's technical and sales staffs.
4) The number of dealers selling these products will be reduced. The same reasoning as in 3) above applies here except that most of the dealers involved are independent operators who do not work directly for VFO or AI Square.
In short, this buyout is probably not going to be the best thing for the availability of low-cost screenreaders to the blind and visually impaired populations. That said, these are only predictions, and the words of caution I wrote at the top should always be kept in mind--things may not go as predicted.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Ana G <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It wasn't my intention to support politically conservative thinking on
the beauties of capitalism and the free market. While competition may
have helped screen reader companies develop better products in the early
days, it hasn't done much to motivate them to develop more affordable
products that help people with disabilities find jobs and participate in
society, unless, of course, those efforts involve paying high prices for
the products themselves, for scripting, and so on. What's been more
helpful to the community lately have been less capitalistic endeavors
like NVDA, a screen reader developed by a couple of guys with private
donations; the Orbit braille display, also developed with money from
private donations; and various Kick Starter projects, like the one
currently being pushed for making Dragon more accessible to screen
reader users.
My question was more literal. How is the fact that one company owns two
lines of competing products in the areas of screen readers, screen
magnifiers, video magnifiers, and braille displays likely to benefit the
community? I can't imagine that having all these great minds in one
location will prompt them all to change their business paradigm. I'm
wondering what kinds of changes we can reasonably expect.
On 6/14/2016 8:12 PM, Tony Swartz wrote:
> While I appreciate the business analysis, it is somewhat simplistic, and I
> suspect motivated by partisan politics. In fact, there has been a movement
> among Wall Street players to focus on niche markets, in this instance, the
> low vision market, to buy up the more significant companies involved. It is
> not so much a move to stifle competition as it is to be the leader in a
> particular technology. Current projections indicate a significant growth in
> the incidence of low vision over the next two decades. The companies
> involved in these purchases while meaningful to us with no vision, are being
> snapped up because of their low vision technologies. Over the last decade,
> there have been other examples of The strategy to buy up/corner, disability
> related technologies. So nothing new here, nor is it based on current
> economic conditions.
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