I run Askiment on this blog. It seems to do a pretty good job at grabbing SPAM (actually it does an excellent job). However it occured to me it might be grabbing a few false positives. If you’ve posted a reply to an entry here and it’s not shown up - blame the spam filter and consider changing something in your response that may upset it. To date I’ve not had to do any manual approvals or rejections, so if it’s affected you that’s probably the reason why.
You’ve passed your apprenticeship, you can code confidently and at the very least competently and now you’re striking out on your own because you have that creative spur to *do something*.
So why on Earth, or Mars or Venus would you rip the code from a component vendor’s demo, make a few cosmetic changes and expect to sell it?
Yet that’s exactly what I saw suggested today on the BOS forum. It’s the kind of disinformation newcomers do not need. I blogged here recently about “If You Don’t Love It Don’t Release It”. How the heck can you love something you have zero creative investment in and zero intellectual investment in? You can’t. You’re literally embracing Amateur-Ville. The realm of the clueless and bereft of talent. There are so many things that need writing/designing and being made available to so many markets.
How did Andy Bryce come up with Perfect Table Plan? Was it because a component vendor made something similar available as a demo? Nope. He identified a market that he could bring his talents to and developed something people wanted. He sells software he clearly loves and from what I can see his customers love it too.
Andy is not the only one. There are so many great applications and some of them don’t take a lot of brain and teeth gnashing to come up with. Patrick McKenzie and his Bingo Card Creator. Hardly a new idea, yet Patrick’s approach is very fresh, compared to his competition, especially his marketing and after sales. His customers seem to love it and it sells. What more could one ask?
A very good friend of mine writes beautiful components for Delphi. Some years back I wrote some of the demos for his ESBPCS VCL library. They are designed purely to demonstrate using the components with, in the case of the demos I did for him, a database via the VCL. They are rudimentary - but they belong to the developer who created them - or the developer they were assigned to (I assigned the code to ESB). I, nor I doubt ESB, would bother chasing a looser trying to sell the simplistic demo as a product, but honestly, how could one feel anything but utter contempt for such a lame brain?
If you have to rip a demo program, mod the interface a tad and release it as a “ISV” product then I’d suggest you do not love your product (how could you with zero intellectual or creative effort invested?) or your ISV company and have complete contempt for your customers, current or potential.
As I’ve said here before, an unloved product ultimately expires via a death of asphyxiation caused by lack of interest and lack of sales. It even harms the efforts of other ISV’s by jading consumer’s perceptions of small software companies.
This is not to say a product must be complex or even totally original or unique. In fact simplicity can have elegance and simple, competent and elegant sells – ask any Mac user. But ripping a demo, modding a few UI elements and expecting to earn a dollar is in my mind immoral at worst and clueless and lame at best.
Over the years as a moderator of software forums I’ve seen a lot of lame stuff submitted for announcement. Over and over again I’ve seen the example program from a certain Delphi how-to book consisting of a rudimentary calculator being sold for $29.95 down to $9.95. They were kidding right? They didn’t even have divide by zero protection coded in, had no keyboard support, just mouse, and looked like crap. At least one of these “developers” went on to moan publicly that nobody was buying his software and he assumed piracy must be the reason. Windows comes with a calculator 10,000 times more powerful than these ones and they reckon it was pirated? Abject losers!
Please. If you think you can do something worthwhile by making interface changes to a demo program offered by a component vendor – do the world a favor and get a job more suited to your talents. Like becoming a dole bludging surfie.*
(*Dole bludging Surfie – Australian slang for an unemployed, lazy beach bum).
After being out of software development in any real commercial sense for almost six years now, a foray into audio (my other love) and a lengthy stretch of personal, debilitating illness I’m at last ready to strike out with a new business as a mISV. The software I’ve chosen (which I will disclose here in this blog in the coming weeks) is something I have domain knowledge in. It leverages my audio skills as a musician and trained audio engineer as well as over thirty years programming. It seems to me to fit well. It’s not designed to attract offers from VC’s or become the next Google or Facebook. In fact the idea of becoming such a thing does not appeal to me at all. Rather something that feeds and provides the kids with an education and offers a comfortable life-style is the ultimate goal of the entire exercise. It’s not strictly B2C and it’s not strictly B2B but rather a blend of the two. There are existing similar app’s but they are amateur and miss targeted. There is nothing at the pro level for this below the thousands of dollars mark. It’s aimed at folks who are novices and does not pretend to be anything a pro audio person would use, though it will incorporate pro features and the audio engine is very powerful. It is not a “media player” like iTunes or WMP or WinAmp. It will cost $’s to purchase and it will include a type of “consumable”.
One of the big issues I faced doing this the last time around (it seems so long ago now) was that I was solo. That meant I had limited amounts of time and motivation to do all the things one has to do on their own. This time my wife is partnering with me. By profession she is a teacher, which fits well with the primary product, and she’s frankly had enough of teaching, the kids are eleven and thirteen now so she has the time to be involved. She’s never been keen on computers but recently has completed several units in computing and this is also ongoing. I think this is an advantage, that she can now use a computer but is still a novice. It helps with R&D and it helps with design and testing. It’s harder for my assumptions to slip through the alpha cycle. Naturally this is a short term advantage as she will progress to a higher level of user in the future, as most people ultimately do.
We face a few startup problems, who doesn’t? My illness and the fact that she has been doing home duties for many years now means cash is a commodity that is scarce. We both need new machines, a compiler update, widgets for the compiler, domain names and hosting (we have the latter already) and all those things that come with such a venture (we are fortunate in having a relatively secure though abysmally small steady income that literally allows us to scrape by at the present time so eating and paying the mortgage kind of stuff are covered). There’s no way I’d borrow for this as I have an allergy to debt of this nature so I need to raise capital. Enter my car. Even though we live in the outer suburbs I’ve sold it to finance this. My wife has her car of course, but I’m not permitted to drive that. :-) So it’s trains for me!
At the time of writing I have sold the car, bought a new dual core Pentium (new monitor to follow) with four Gigs of RAM and a terabyte total of HD space. I’ve handed my old dev’ machine to my wife as initially a single core with a Gig of RAM will be just fine for her. I’ve updated to Delphi 2007 and started buying widgets where I can to save on dev’ time. I think this is important. Just because you can code it doesn’t mean you should waste extra time doing it. So I’ve begun buying widget sets (components) that I require in order to get look and feel right without having to code in minutiae. Very happy with the first mock-ups for this reason.
But cash wise this is pretty much exhausted now so we need to raise more. I ran an experiment on eBay over a year ago with quick and easy to develop software and discovered to my amazement it sold extremely well (enough to live off, albeit not live well). For various reasons at the time I did not pursue it further. We will be (we have!) developing a series of applications (twenty to start with, all with the same code base but for different purposes) with which to leverage this and gain the extra income. The core product took eight hours to code. Each application then takes another eight or less to snap in (reports, UI differences etc). To my mind these are attractive looking programs, care was taken with the UI and code leveraging experience and study that I have done. I’ll provide further details here in the coming weeks with some links. I’ve not decided as to whether or not I will publish actual sales data or not yet. The mISV isn’t technically the eBay stuff. That’s purely for income generation in the shorter term. However beyond that it is my intention to be relatively transparent and frank about the process. It’s also my hope that this blog will assist me in staying focussed.
More Soon….
Remember the Windows 95 release and the advertising slogan from Microsoft? Well times have changed and it seems Microsoft are applying a different philosophy. “Where” and “Go” have been replaced by “Who” and “annoy” with the announcement that they intended UAC to annoy people in Vista. Yep - it’s not a goof folks, according to David Cross, a product manager at Microsoft, it’s intentional. A carefully considered action to force all those using Admin as the default install on Windows (and running that as their main account) to quit in order to avoid all those nasty security breaches Windows users so dearly love. In addition those pesky ISV ’s (and mISV’s - we’re included in this) are being forced to stop installing data into directories designed for programs, stop requiring admin priv’s for installs and other basic tasks.
They’re telling us now? Talk about the bleeding obvious!
Hmmm. Couldn’t Microsoft have looked at some examples twelve years ago and got a clue from there about the potential of allowing these kind of things in the first place? There were plenty of them - then and now. But then nobody would ever need more than 128k of RAM - huh? 
Full story Click Here.
Maybe the next version of Windows will have something like Sudo - eh? I can imagine the exploits the malware brigade will rush to implement already.
In my last entry I bemoaned the look of most mISV software (and some bigger ISV’s too) and how amatuer it looked in general. I thought it’d be nice if I showed an example of a product (that I have no relationship with at all) that simply looks well done and balanced. See this link at Evolved Software. As you can see it’s icons are nicely chosen and fit well with each other. It doesn’t bend or break design rules and pretty much adheres to standards. The result is a nice professional and easy to intuit interface. Well done to the developers!
..Or Getting Rid Of That Infernal Noise
A lot of folks are going to get incredibly annoyed at this entry (you know who you are).
OK. I’m a moderator of three Usenet big 8 newsgroups (comp hierarchy) and they relate specifically to so called “shareware”. I’ve been the moderator there since there inception a decade ago when Usenet was still a big communications channel and nobody had really thought much about online forums. Blogs was a noun used when referring to an unknown person (Joe Blogs) and of course it was before the so called .com bust. Pretty much everything that happened in the arena of small companies selling software that you could download and try was defined as “shareware” back then. ISV and mISV etc had not been defined. There were a few lame attempts at terms like “Trialware” here and there that never had a hope of going anywhere as a term. Consumers defined a company, as did magazine reviewers and pundits, as a “shareware company” and around about this time the folks running these companies tried, in vain, to get people to understand that “shareware” was a marketing method and not a type of software – or company. I say in vain because the majority, including the IT industry by and large don’t get it and in cases I’ve met personally refuse to get it.
So what’s the big deal anyway? Does it actually matter what you call yourself? Is “shareware” a negative connotation? To this I really have to say, yes and yes. But not for the reasons quoted by most folks.
To the first the obvious answer is you are a software company. Simple. Your customers won’t know what an ISV or mISV is – maybe this will change in time, but it’s not important. They will know what a “shareware” company is (even though their definition is in error) however and I really do believe you *must* avoid this for 97% of people.
The second is about application look and feel.
Go to any download site and most software sites run by people selling downloadable trials of their software and it pretty much *looks like so called shareware*. Seriously. That’s the first impression of the screenshots. That’s the first impression after downloading the program. You can justify the validity of definitions till the cows come home, but this is what people think after downloading.
First impressions count and so do ongoing impressions. Is this bad? I argue yes. Look and feel is more important than us geeks often realize. Products like Visual Studio from Microsoft and Borland’s Delphi and so on allow us to create a look and feel for our applications that fits with the Windows paradigm for user interfaces. On the Mac tools like Interface Builder from Apple perform the same function.
On the Mac people using this tool seem to get what they are supposed to do with it. But too many, way too many, Windows software developers (small and large) totally and completely and utterly stuff it up!
The Office 2003 look, for example, is not hard to achieve. It’s a consistent UI and lots of people use it in their app’s for Windows. But they still make the blasted things look like a drunken wombat careened through the interface with roller-skates wielding a machete!
No balance, no thought, no idea!
I’ve blogged about the importance of good icons and so on in another post here recently. But I’ve actually seen examples of folks who bought stock icons that matched and were perfectly useable and still managed to screw them up! Mixing sets can work – but it takes care and it takes trial and error.
I’ve also seen them somehow manage to shift the colors of the icons into ghastly 16 bit aka Windows 16 bit/Windows 95 style. Get a grip! If you can’t stand the heat hire a designer!
I have a new image format mantra for icons and glyphs. If it’s not PNG with alpha channels it’s out!
How many people spend even 25% of their time developing a slick UI for the software compared to the time spent writing code? It should probably take most weeks of tweaking judging by the array of ghastly interfaces available to terrify the unwary downloader.
In a reasonably sized application if it took you a day (or worse you did it on the fly and rushed off to get to the code) you probably haven’t got it right – nowhere near right. Henry Ford famously offered his Model T in black and black only. But he *did* paint it at least. The Model T looked finished, quirky or obsolete by today’s standards sure, but it looked balanced and finished. Most software companies don’t do this. The UI is totally overlooked. In a couple of words “they suck.”
Is your application a Porsche or an old rusty bicycle?
Study interface design. This should be an ongoing study that never ends. Look at the top end of town. See what they are doing in the big app’s or the high volume sales app’s. See what works (some of it does not).
Only use skins if skins add value to the program (just skinning for the hell of it often looks exactly like that). Remember if you choose to skin allow folks to disable skins because not everybody likes your color preferences. By their standards you might qualify as color blind!
Note that some users hate skins period.
Don’t ignore looking at interfaces on other platforms like the Mac. The Mac really has it together in this regard and those of us who generally code for Windows can pick up some subtle lessons.
One important lesson from the Mac is task related design. What are your users tasks and how does your program fulfill them. Crowding up your interface in every screen with every task is not a solution it’s a disaster and it’s more often than not butt ugly. Consider breaking tasks into multiple windows or hidden panes.
Great thing about this is that it can reduce new user support issues as well while not impeding advanced users.
People do like “cool”. The wow factor in this industry can not be overlooked. Ignore it at the cost of sales. How your product looks may well be the deciding factor between your product and somebody else’s.
Cheap knock-off programs (like those you compete against) won’t stack up to a quality professional interface.
Most people like to own things that look the best and make them feel happy. Crush the losers who copy you with a class act interface.
Make a statement with your interface about who you and your company really are!
Don’t know if you folks check your web logs in relation to browsers very often, I know I do. I’m impressed to see all the different flavours from I.E. to Firefox, Safari and of course the various products that ship with Linux distros. What does surprise me is the amount of people using old browsers - especially folks reading this blog who most probably are developers. Now - it’s none of my concern what browser you use and the reasons you use it - but I do wonder why folks don’t upgrade? Especially where Internet Explorer is concerned. I.E. 7 has been out for two years now and yet lots of folks are still runnning version 6. Similar stat’s can be seen for Firefox versions. Wouldn’t upgrading make sense? You can read more here from the article that inspired this post, it has some interesting stat’s and information on an effort to get folks to upgrade:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/25/save-the-developers-stop-using-internet-explorer-6/
On the topic of not upgrading - I’ve also seen in the web logs for this blog Windows versions going back to Win98. Win98? Developers? Yep - around 60+ hits (and two for NT 4). I find this odd, though no doubt somebody will point out some very good reasons (which I’ll probably instantly refute - but hey what’s a blog without at least one troll post from the owner? <g>).
Finally - the range of OS’ I’m seeing is impressive. In the membership only forums I am or have been a member of it’s rare to see many - if any - Mac and *nix developers. Most of the visitors here come from the BOS http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz forums. I’m getting consistently high visits from Mac and *nix users (developers I assume from the source) and the Mac is way in front of *nix flavours. XP of course leads the crowd, Vista staggers in at a distant second.
Scott Kane
One of the things that really bugs me is seeing software that not even its mother, the software designer, loves.
We see it all the time with ugly screens, broken functionality, sixteen bit icons, stolen icons, icons that come with the IDE etc ad nauseam. Why? Because the developer gets a “hot idea”, plugs away and then releases to the world, throws it onto download sites, maybe does some SEO with Google et al.
Said software rarely gets updated, rarely gets bug fixed, rarely gets bought and is frequently dismissed if not despised. Heck, it even gets small software companies a bad rep amongst B2B and even consumers.
Who ever thought up the idea of selling programming languages to Joe and Jill Sixpack? Websites or shrink wrapped products with “Even you can program” ought to be taken out back and shot, or at least hauled up under local laws for false advertising. We see this all the time on the software forums. Folks wanting an “idea” to write the “next killer” program, or how to find an idea for the “next killer” program, oh – and they want to be able to do it all in two weeks!!
This is how some unloved software is released. Money is the only motivator, no interest in the product, customer or future. Product is abandoned.
Another instance is where a hobbyist with domain knowledge writes a product and releases, initially loving the *idea* of such a program (and the kudos that come with it) but are technically inept and lack design skills. The idea is loved here but not the program. Product is abandoned.
In other instances the programmer is technically competent, loves programming, has domain knowledge and loves the idea. However the actual program is not loved, as evidenced by look and feel. Products frequently abandoned.
It’s interesting to see that the products that are clearly loved by their “mothers” survive and prosper. Some of them are pretty basic as far as depth of functionality goes, yet have loyal customers and benefit from frequent updates.
It’s not enough to be technically competent to love a product *we’re talking products for resale here – not tools or basic utilities). A car does not need paint to run, it can be rusty and look awful but run just fine and do what it is supposed to do, get you from a to b. But would you love such a car? Nope. You’d hate a car to look like this, no matter how functional. A nice shiny, nicely painted car, for most people, is something to love.
Software is no different.
Build your product so that it is technically competent. That’s essential and bears no dissention. Certainly release early, I believe in that fully. But love the product. Be meticulous with the graphics and layout. Icons should be modern, there is no excuse for this. They can be bought pretty cheaply too. See http://www.icons-icons.com/ for some great designs, there are others.
Take some time out, if you are a Windows or *nix developer, to look at some Mac products. Mac developers get this idea. In the best products the icons on toolbars are color coordinated. They take the time to do it right, showing they love the program and their customers, Mac users, demand nothing less. When delivered they have some of the most loyal customers you could find.
Keep in mind at all times that if you love your products and it shows you love them through attention to detail, not just code but look and feel, it’s more likely your customers will love them too.
So do you *really* love your product?
There are some really great blogs and books out there for ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors) and also some aimed at so called “mISV’s” (the m standing for micro effectively meaning smaller in size – for the purposes of this basic explanation). So it’s not my intent to create yet another blog duplicating their fine work. I will add links to them in article entries as and when they are relevant to the topic and certain (selected) blogs will be added to the blog roll of this blog. Which brings me to the point of this first entry. Who the heck am I and what on Earth is a Dropbear and how does this relate to ISV’s?
I’ll leave the gory details of who I am for those who want to pursue it on the About page of this blog. You can make of it what you will but suffice to say I’m moderator of the Usenet comp.software.shareware.* (authors, announce and users) newsgroups, have been associated with “shareware” in one capacity or another for over two decades and I’m am an ISV (actually an mISV in the process of developing a new range of applications for a vertical market while also holding an Advanced Degree in Vaporware) and slaved as a corporate developer for way to long for a couple of companies most people have heard of and I’d rather forget.
Now – Dropbears (I’ll deal with ISV’s below I promise!!). Dropbears are a fictional animal designed to scare Australian kids and tourists (especially tourists). There is an entire artificial mythology built around Dropbears. They get there name (so the myth goes) by dropping out of trees on their victims and gobbling them up, flesh, bones, clothes, and cameras (especially cameras as this is the reason given why no Dropbear has ever been filmed). They are attracted by eucalyptus (given that the Australian forests are 99% eucalyptus trees avoiding them would appear to be tough) and repelled by a product called “Aeroguard ™” (a personal insecticide for the record marketed in
Well may you ask. Much of the “information” that floats around the industry is FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) perpetrated often by folks who mean well, who believe what they are saying is true (and often it is for them) but fail to comprehend that it isn’t true or it’s based on certain “assumptions” (and you know what we do when we ASSUME) or that it applies in certain circumstances – but not all (theirs but maybe not yours). So like the fictional (though none the less fearful and much believed in) Dropbear there’s a lot of fictional ISV information floating around for various reasons. Because of this some important things are actually missed altogether and/or dismissed without deeper consideration or thought. This doesn’t make them any less relevant however. Thus a Dropbear for an ISV may be believing in what is not true or just as bad not believing in that which is true. Hence the anaology of this blog. As Kierkegaard said “There are two ways of being deceived. One is to believe that which is not true. The other is to not believe that which is true.” However…. In so following his words we have to also be mindful of Confucious “In painting a tiger you can paint the skin but not the bones.”
So if you’re after a “How to start an ISV” or “How To Choose A Software Product To Write And Make Millions” type blog this isn’t it. Nor is it a “Here’s How To Write A Pirate Proof Registration Scheme” or which compiler is best for the job - besides everybody uses Delphi anyway don’t they? ;-) . There are some great discussion on this stuff already on some blogs and I’ll be adding links to those over time where you can read all about it there. Rather this blog looks at the things we often don’t consider or assume to be true (that word assume again) and questions the validity of those things.
I’ll elaborate further as time goes on but most of the entries will be serialized (weekly parts I hope) discussing specific topics. For example I’ll be doing a piece on the hidden cost of software piracy, looking at how it may not always affect the software developer directly (there’s a new thought!) but indirectly. The nature of pirates and hackers/crackers have evolved in the last decade to entirely different beasts to what we think they are. Other articles will focus on download sites and how I have come to believe they can actually damage your business.
Where information is available on the net I’ll provide direct links, unless those links feed to an undesirable entity or persons. The last thing I want to do is give some criminal a free Google plug to boost their rankings or advertise their wares for free!
As ISV’s the information we hear and repeat tends to be a bit like urban myths that are much loved but based on little research or awareness of trends - which is why I chose the name for this blog. ”The Recursive ISV”. Please see Recursive for an explanation.
Oh yeah - and crikey, mate - watch out for those Dropbears!!!!