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A former teacher at New York's posh Dalton School, Luyen Chou: now president and CEO of Learn Technologies Interactive, opted into the fizzled consumer CD-ROM market with dreams of high-quality titles, no platform hassles and wide distribution. Since launching in 1994, his company has taught the old hands some new lessons. UPSIDE: Besides Voyager www.voyagerco.com) and Corbis www.corbis.com), Learn is the other company making quality educational CDROM titles. The Voyager Co. has not been a business success; Corbis is owned by Bill Gates, and it can afford to spend half a million dollars per title. How can you survive? CH= It's a matter of being nimble, able to adapt to the marketing exigencies. But that's only one part of it; many people claim to do that well. Another crucial piece is the cost of development. Generally in the CD-ROM market, quality has been nudged off the shelf, particularly in K-12, as it has experienced downward price pressure. Our move to do 100 percent of our engineering in [Sofia] Bulgaria has been a cornerstone of our business strategy. As a result, we can engineer products for about a quarter of what it costs our competitors and, at the same time, engineer using real languages such as C++. We're building a suite of proprietary software rather than-as some other companies have done-doing everything in authoring languages, which means they don't own and control the code. Is the CD-ROM business a thankless market? Since you started in '94, the market has gone down in terms of pricing, the availability of titles and distribution. And it's a challenge for consumers to find good titles. There are many days when I go home saying, "It's thankless!" As an industry, we're not putting together a high-quality product. And though we're flattered to be mentioned along with Voyager and Corbis, it's appalling that we should be in such limited company. As a consumer, I find that most of the time when I spend money on CD-ROMs or interactive content, I'm not getting my money's worth. Isn't that a function of the market, what consumers want? The games market is huge, and the quality has been poor from the start. Yet they're more widely used and distributed. Maybe people don't care about high quaity. In all consumer industries, we have a democratic market that plays to the lowest common denominator, whether it's film, music, books or multimedia. If you can prove you're about quality and can create a quality brand, you have a chance to succeed and to flourish.