Archive for the 'Other ISVs' Category

Neil Davidson, organizer of the Business of Software conference, created a MicroISV survey and just announced the first results in Joel’s Business of Software Forum. I was very surprised when I saw that only 12% of the MicroISVs who participated in the survey develop and sell web applications. I was under the impression that most of the new MicroISVs that announce their software on BoS are into web applications, but I guess I have been wrong. Anyway, the most interesting part of the survey, the download and revenue numbers of participating MicroISVs, will be published in another blog posting next week.

Just like Ian we have noticed that the MicroISV scene has become quiet over time and that there aren’t many MicroISV blog postings written or ideas exchanged anymore. Ian mentions one of the possible reasons that the MicroISV movement isn’t as visible anymore as it was a few years ago. He thinks that the MicroISV idea is often confused with the strong startup movement going on at the moment. I think it’s a very good point, but there are other reasons why the MicroISV scene has become quiet in my opinion:

Time is money
I think many of the initial MircoISVs that shared business, marketing and MicroISV ideas on their blogs realized that blogging about their products and target markets is often more effective than blogging about their businesses. Although there are many benefits of blogging about your business (customer loyality, SEO, exchanging ideas with others), a day has only so many hours. And because we all wear many hats as a MicroISV, we have to think about how we spend our time. Sometimes other things than blogging about your business or participating in business communities feel more appropriate.

Learning by doing
Although I learn new things every day, I have learned the most about starting a MicroISV in the first 2 years or so. All the little details you have to care about in the beginning lead to blog postings, asking questions, giving tips and just exchanging ideas (registering a business, creating a website, building a shop, beta testing your product, researching additional marketing ideas, getting the first customers, providing customer support, price finding and 500 other things). Now that many MicroISVs either managed all the initial tasks or failed with their business, a lot of MicroISVs are now concentrating more on their products and customers.

Fear of competition
I noticed that more and more new and established MicroISVs in the Business of Software forum are posting anonymously because of fear of competition. Transparently blogging about their business and exchanging ideas in context (i.e. with their name and website address) would probably be the last thing they would do and this is another point why the MicroISV scene isn’t as active/visible as it used to be. Although there are really some new competitors who have been inspired by our .NET logging tool (we know of at least 2 products that were developed because the vendors saw that we have success with our product), blogging has been much more useful than harmful for us. And I’m sure there are new help desk software products that were inspired by HelpSpot, but I believe Ian has benefited a lot from his blog as well.

We have been guilty of not blogging about the MicroISV life and business in the last months, but we intent to change this to play our small role in making this community more active again.

It looks like Fog Creek is adding a Wiki to their bug tracking product Fogbugz. How I know this? Look at Joel’s latest posting. Notice the link to the Wiki? It’s a link to a Fogbugz installation.

If the Wiki is done right, with good integration with the rest of Fogbugz, this could become a very useful feature. We used the Wiki in Trac before we switched to Fogbugz, and it certainly was nice to have.

Just a quick note that Jon of ViEmu just released his new product, a vi/vim emulator for Word and Outlook, making this his third product. Tobias reviewed ViEmu for Visual Studio a while back on this blog but to be fair, ViEmu improved a lot since the early days so don’t base your decision to try out Jon’s products on this review.

I noticed that DonationCoder.com is currently offering a 50% discount on MyLifeOrganized, a todo list application I previously mentioned. So if you are looking for a decent time and todo list management tool for your desktop machine and/or Windows Mobile phone, I can recommend that application. I also noticed that there are special discounts for Direct Access and Surfulator on the same site, both from regulars of the Business of Software forum.

Nagarsoft just released the Direct Access shortcut utility. This tool allows you to configure keyboard commands for launching applications, entering text snippets into the active application, send an email or open a website. Direct Access already got some fans that love the product. Congratulations for releasing the 1.0!

Andrea, the author of Direct Access, used SmartInspect to monitor some hard to debug code in Direct Access. He told me that it was a real godsend for him when he found SmartInspect, so it’s even better to see Direct Access being successfully released.

In case you are not subscribed to J’s The growing pains of NGEDIT blog (which you should be!), you may have missed a smart marketing move from him: He designed a graphical key overview and tutorial for vi/vim.

What’s so smart about it you may ask? Well, he submitted the link to delicious and reddit and is listed on the front page. He is probably getting a lot of traffic now and can promote his .. vim emulation software for Visual Studio!

With just a simple and good idea and a bit of work, he drives highly targeted traffic to his site (vim users), offers something useful to his visitors and can promote his product. This is a win-win situation. That’s why this is very smart, in my opinion.

Alex King wrote a posting about the Zend Studio PHP IDE where he reports that you are actually allowed to use a license on more than one computer even though the license text states otherwise. He also emphasizes that there are no developers who use only one computer these days.

When we started developing SmartInspect we also thought about this issue and decided that we would allow the installation of SmartInspect on up to three computers per licensed user. You still need to buy one SmartInspect license for each named user, but a user can install SmartInspect on his work PC, notebook and computer at home for example. Our license text states:

“Gurock grants to the Customer, after registration and payment of the licence fee, the non-exclusive right to install, to load and run the licensed programs on a maximum of three computer systems per licensed user. Note that a licence must be purchased for each person who uses the licensed programs. A licence is thus tied to a particular person.”

This affects only the SmartInspect Console by the way, as we allow licensed users to redistribute the libraries royalty-free. I think it’s fair to allow the usage of a license on more than one computer and most desktop programs should use this license concept in my opinion. I know that at least Nick Bradbury licenses his TopStyle and FeedDemon programs the same way. Is anyone else in the microISV community using this approach?

In case you haven’t seen it, Eric Sink just announced his new book Business of Software. Eric writes:

“After what seems like an eternity of proofreading, today is the day that my book is being sent off to be printed. The book is essentially a collection of essays from here on my weblog, each one edited and prefaced with an introduction.”

The articles are all online on his site, but if you prefer a paper copy, you can already pre-order the new book on Amazon.

I just saw that Axosoft is running a special discount for their project management/bug tracking/help desk software. The 5 user edition of OnTime normally costs $495 and is available for just $5 until Friday. I thought this might be of interest to some of you in case you are not already using such tools.

(I haven’t used OnTime yet and I’m not associated with them in any way, but getting something like this for just $5 is rare.)