Some obvious differences would be:

1. As demonstrated earlier, we hold GUI customization to be a core part of the system. Not only is our GUI cusotimizable visually, but it's a highly programmable system, very object oriented and WYSIWYG in design.

2. It's considerably less expensive and doesn't scale up in price to support more lighting loads.

3. The correct configuration of a locked away back end is fundamental to the system, not something that only kicks in in the higher level versions of the product.

4. Other than our not providing any hardware of our own would be just as powerful as Lifeware for lower cost.

5. Our media architecture isn't dependent on MCE but is our own repository, and being part of our own code base it's fully integrated.

6. Instead of using as many Window's services as possible, we use as few as possible, so we control our quality to a very high degree. We've written a huge amount of code (over 700K lines currently), which meant that we took longer to get the features in, but our foundation is now broad and powerful. Except for a couple of small scenarios, such as currently our metadata retrieval system which goes through the WMP engine, we don't use anything more than the most fundamental of system services. That will also go away before too much longer.

Most folks don't realize how unusual our situation is to have such a huge proprietary code base of our own to build our product on, all written by a single person over a almost two decades now, so that it has a level of coherency and quality that is almost non-existent in such large products. It's very rare and a huge advantage for us.

7. We are not spending enormous amounts of money on advertising, and instead are concentrating on delivering a high quality product that meets people's needs and is very robust. So we are not doing the 'sell or die' burn rate scenario, and are not in any danger of going under if we don't start selling like hot cakes very soon. We saw that CIs are the conduit to the customer in this industry and you cannot advertise or BS your way into the CI channel (as demonstrated in this thread.) You can only get there by demonstrating that you can deliver a powerful and stable product, and the truth will always become known in such a relatively small community. So we saw little value in going down that path. The CI community with either accept a product on its merits or not.

8. I don't live in a mansion and take skiing trips. I live in a one bedroom apartment and dedicate my life to this product and its quality and our service reflects directly on me, so I take it very seriously. I may be socially retarded and unable to get a date with diamonds tied around my neck, but I am a demon software developer and I love what I do and take tremendous proffesional pride in what we deliver.