I don't believe the cost factor quoted.
I do, however, believe it's easy. It can be done with a 99 cent app. Apple has done it thousands of time on things infinitely more complicated than just converting a file format. Teenage game app developers would laugh at how simple the process of converting to the env file format is. It's all two dimensional - no sound - no motion - it's just a printed report! It's all about making money off the customer.
As one common example - there is no reason Flash can't run on Android, but it doesn't - and it's not because of technical issues. It's marketing and ripping off the customer in the process.
Wow! I wish I had you programming for me! I could have obviously saved thousands of dollars and hours! i never realized how easy it was to convert something to a ridiculous ENV format. How stupid was I spending all that time and effort doing so!!!
Should have just hired a kid to do a 99 cent app for me to do it!
Tell you what. Go spend some time writing your own software to do it, farm it out to India if you want. Stop using third party software and just use what you create. See how long you stay in business.
I love when people think it is so easy or some idiot with a few excel spreadsheets and no data exporting capabilities whining about monopolies that don't exist thinks software developers charge too much.
Be a professional. Buy the best tools and it helps you provide the best service. The one's who keep cost as a factor in this business are usually the ones who suffer the most during slow times.
As for converting PDF's, even that is not as straight forward as you think. Yes, I can easily read everything in a PDF...lines, pictures, text, etc.. But it is much more difficult to actually extract JUST the data than you think, and there are NOT 99 cent apps or Apple converters for this, just format changers, which is different from actually discerning content. It is one thing to be able to get all the text and pictures and display them: it is entirely another thing to know what they are and where they go in some other proprietary format.
JMNSHBPOO (Just my not so humble but po'd opinion considering all I had gone through in the last 20 years writing appraisal software and always listening to people who have never done it tell me how easy it is)
JD
