Yesterday (Saturday, October 8th) we visited the Rockton World's Fair. It was a really great fall fair, and all in all was one of the better ones we've enjoyed (it and the Caledonia Fair from last weekend were the best we've ever seen). If anything, the Rockton fair seemed more legitimately rural than most.
It had all of the requisite animal shows, competitions in countless categories, and a half decent little midway for a little fair. Great fun was had by all.
Every Thanksgiving Day (in Canada) weekend we take a walk at Crawford Lake - it's a beautiful, geologically unique little lake left behind as the glaciers receded 10,000 years ago, and it's one of the better conservation aresa here in Halton. It's also connected to the Bruce Trail, and you can hike over to Rattlesnake Point from it. Unfortunately, like last year, the colour change of the leaves is a bit delayed, so it isn't as beautiful as it is going to be in a week or two. We'll have to return there then.
You recently released some software - Banana Crop Foundation Server 2005(TM) - which allows users to plan, track and report on their banana crops, improving their operational efficiency measurably. You have some competitors in the space - some even inexpensive or free, several of them open source - but they aren't nearly as comprehensive or intuitive as yours.
Sales are brisk and times are good. While you're charging a fairly hefty licensing fee, the price is small compared to the benefits your software brings to your users (users whose profit margins increase because their competitors are still doing things the old-fashioned way). Congratulations! It is an enviable position for an ISV to be in.
Things aren't all puppydogs and lollipops, however. You've heard through the grapevine that many of the smaller banana producers have taken to your software, but finding your fees too high they've resorted to pirating it.
Annoyed by this "unmaterialized revenue", you do some number crunching and find that they couldn't afford your software anyways. At least not at a price that would make it worth your while. You also know from impromptu surveys that they'd just use the free stuff anyways if push came to shove.
What should you do? Should you super-size your copy protection? Should you pursue legal options against these miscreants? Are you really losing anything given that these non-paying users wouldn't buy your software anyways?
This is a very interesting software positioning and economics question, and it isn't nearly as clear-cut as it appears to be at first glance. The typical reply many would come back with is that "they wouldn't be paying customers anyways. Be thankful for the free advertising and look the other way". Others would say that you should provide a gratis or very low cost "small producer" version that would give these producers a leg-up: Maybe one day they'll grow and become a major customer.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it overlooks the core competitive advantage that your software brings to your paying customers
The problem with that line of thinking is that it overlooks the core competitive advantage that your software brings to your paying customers: Each user - legal or not - is being viewed as an island rather than a rich ecosystem that feed off of each other. For instance if every banana producer has the software, then Big Co has effectively gained no advantage buying your software, and in many ways it is now coming at a net loss (because they're paying for software that merely puts them on an equal footing with their competitors. Competitors who are using it for free).
You can see this sort of piracy and price positioning quandary in many places. The small graphics designer saves up enough to buy a copy of Photoshop CS, yet instead of gaining a professional advantage, he's merely even with countless competitors who just downloaded it from a torrent. Similarly, from a global perspective many large software companies overlook software piracy in the developing world, or they offer their wares at a substantial discount, yet what happens when all of their high-paying development shops, paying tens or hundreds of thousands in licensing fees, close up, unable to compete against the coding dens running their entire infrastructure with marginal software overhead?
In mainstream culture, where to many it is a fight to keep up with the Joneses, the same sort of thing occurs with media piracy - if two kids get an allowance, and one pirates a copy of the latest cool CD and spends his allowance on a cool T-shirt, and the other instead spends his money on a legal copy of the CD, the latter is culturally a loser - he is falling behind the Joneses. Unless there is morally or legally enough of a risk to piracy, the former has "won" in the equation. Naturally the latter is going to reconsider his options the next time allowance day comes around.
On the flip side, if you fight piracy too hard and you might encourage the evolution of open source competitors. The more difficult Photoshop is to acquire and use, the more improvements GIMP is likely to see, because let's face it: To most users it's the gratis freedom that matters a lot more than the libre freedom.
All in all a very complex problem with no clear answers. It certainly isn't as clearcut as "if they wouldn't pay for it anyways then they aren't a lost sale".
I am a huge fan of Flickr.
I love the Lemonade-out-of-Lemons domain name - you just know that they sat there with Godaddy, punching in every combination until a misspelling finally came back as available: Nowadays people don't decide upon a business name and then try to find a correlating domain. Instead they check out random or loosely correlated domain availability and compromise. yafla had just such an origin (though it has really grown on me since).
I love the simple interface design of the Flickr website. I love the features (intuitive "Web 2.0" features like in-place edits of titles, captions, and so on, coupled with massive capacity and bandwidth with a remarkably liberal usage policy. Even on the desktop Flickr is a winner, with a simple yet powerful resize & upload utility that makes incrementally populating one's online photo archive a breeze).
I love occasionally browsing through some of the beautiful photos uploaded by other users for a bit of entertainment and inspiration. I love the ability to combine photos into sets. I love the distributed keyword method of loosely categorizing photos.
I especially love the way that you can set relationships to other people, allowing me to limit certain photos (such as those of my children) to family, other photos to friends, and so on. While I don't use it to build new cyber-relationship networks, I do find it worthwhile as real-world friends and family join the service (mostly at my incessant urging. I don't spam out emails full of pictures of my kids anymore, but instead upload to Flickr and provide access for the appropriate people. If they're interested, they can look. If they're not then at least I haven't filled their inbox quota).
If Flickr keeps going with the current philosophies and designs, it will continue to be a winner. Its competitors will have a really tough time doing something better, unless they start sending out cheques to users for using their services. If there was one possible weakness in Flickr's armour, it is that its competitors could use feature-rich desktop photo indexing software to kickstart their web venture.
I am not Flickr's optimal customer, however.
A large selection of llama inspired gifts, jewelry, art, collectibles and stuffed animals from Nose-N-Toes. Com.
While I use it to store and share my photos, I never click on ads (not only are they something I naturally tune out anyways, the keyword correlations makes for some really ridiculous impressions. I recently uploaded a picture of a llama at a country fair I visited. Now I'm getting ads selling llama goods and services), and the stickiness of the site is limited for me. Instead of uploading my photos and then participating in late night discussions with other amateur photographers, oohing and ahhing about each of their photos and hoping for the same in return, I'm very utilitarian in the way I use the site. My relationship network is not built in Flickr, or on the online world, but instead I crystallize my real-world network in Flickr.
This interests me because the business model of a large number of sites, particularly "Web 2.0" sites, rely upon a considerable amount of stickiness - Not only will you visit, but you'll hang around. Just like television, these sites hope to draw you in for a period of time under the premise that not only are you more likely to see some revenue generation that interests you (e.g. ads), but you're also more tightly bound to that community.
Time is finite, however. I've discarded countless web ideas because while the services might be utilitarian and useful for some needs of some people, they were too marginal to realistically charge a fee, yet there was no way I could rationally establish enough stickiness (you can only create discussion groups about so many things).
How in the world is Weblogs.com worth $2.3 million dollars? Being a default ping destination for a lot of blog services and clients certainly holds some value, but as it is Weblogs.com is primarily a spam amplifier.
[Sorry for the overuse of quoted words and phrases in the following entry, however it is used where text is conceptually, but not literally, true]
For my blogging software I chose Radio Userland. While it uses a web interface to create and edit entries, practically it's a fat client application - I have the pseudo-service running, indicating its presence in my system tray, and I only ever modify entries "on" this one PC. Radio has its own database, and it streams static updates via the local service to the FTP server at my web host whenever I change content.
Pretty straightforward, and it works admirably for my needs.
One of the hesitations I had going this route, however, was that it would limit my portability - many of the hosted tools allow you to author and edit online against remote services running in some large datacenter, from any browser, from anywhere. Of course I could sort-of gain the physical "from anywhere" advantage by installing Radio on a laptop and bringing the laptop with me wherever I went. While that would also give me the ability to work offline (something many of the hosted services don't allow), it still wouldn't help me when working on foreign PCs.
So basically I had to choose between the always available hosted thin-client route, or the isolated thick-client route. Right?
Of course it's never that simple.
Through the magic of VPN and Remote Desktop, I can access this desktop through appropriate "thin clients" throughout the world (appropriate simply meaning "running Windows". Actually, given that there are L2TP and RDP clients for other platforms, pretty much any modern system can act as a "thin client" to this "web service" of sorts, but the easiest and most straightforward are Windows PCs). As my home is connected via an always on, very reliable, credibly high speed wired connection, like millions of others nowadays, it's virtually always accessible. Just as accessible as Wordpress or Moveable Type, in fact.
Well that's only partially true - many locations, sometimes even including coffee shop hotspots, limit you to HTTP(S), presuming that everything that you'd ever want in the world should be available over that protocol. This is obviously a hindrance to VPNing to a remote PC, and it's pretty much the only differentiation between my home "server" and the hosted blog services. Even that is fairly easily surmountable problem however.
I only mention this because many people still have a consciousness gap about the advantages that an always on, high speed connection brings. It really is a great equalizer. I can access and update my blog virtually anywhere (though thus far I've only ever really used remote connectivity to hit publish on an already created entry when I needed to stagger output a bit - I just find home a comfortable place to author entries)
Aside: I mentioned previously that I envision RDP, or something similar, becoming a potential widely-used thin client protocol for "web" services (services from the human perspective rather than the W3C perspective). It would be interesting to see what sort of accessible tools someone like Google could create with such a malleable and fine grained interface technology.