Marketing Report: Mike Ford

  Our sales are very closely tracking the curve that he forecast in January but we are about a month behind. SunFlex is now accounting for only about one half of our sales (this is clearly shown on the sales summary sheet). Mike forecasts that the rapid growth trend will continue. We now have several competitors but at least in the case of P-CAD it is not yet for sale. Rik of Mike's staff is writing an   article on CAD. Four people from TI visited us in our office in Mill Valley and all went well. Two were from corporate and two from the engineering workstation project. They seem to be very impressed and we were asked to purchase a TI and they agreed they would purchase enough AutoCADs to reimburse us. Zenith will have a machine here Monday. Heath has decided they want about 250 AutoCADs in the next year. They put a fire under Zenith. Heath wants it on a Zenith so they can expose it to their salesmen before the end of July. Note: on ordering machines, etc., request that the machines be shipped directly to your house then give John Kern a call so he can pay the invoice when it comes. Many shipments for AutoCAD members have been coming to the office and that results in delays getting the equipment to you. Mike Ford and Duff Kurland went to NCGA for 4 days--it was a high class show with all the big CAD guys (Auto-Trol, Computervision, etc.). There were about 22,000 attendees. It was worth being there since only about 25% were end users, the rest were dealers, manufacturers, and educators. There were 5 competing CAD packages at the show. P-CAD, MARS ($14K including hardware), Microcomp ($6K for software), Bausch and Lomb ($29K), and Summagraphics, (poor notes here). Nine manufacturers came to see us. Mike Ford recommends that we lend an 8087 to Neil Zackery who is supposedly going to write an article about AutoCAD. Greg Lutz agreed to buy the 8087. Tektronix may want 100 ACAD's.