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".

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.

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.

I registered that domain some time ago, primarily as a publishing location of various SQL Server articles that I've self-published. Since then I've gotten a tonne of interest by people who'd like to contribute (people who know me and like my stuff), mostly people irritated seeing it sitting idle (I've had far too much on my plate for a while).

As such, today I switched http://www.professionalsqlserver.com over to a MediaWiki (the powerful platform that Wikipedia runs atop), though it'll take a while for the DNS change to fully propagate. It should make for interesting times, and I hope to learn a lot about online collaboration, and about the MediaWiki platform. Right now it's a bit of a mess, but I tend to exploit and master these things pretty quickly, so watch for it to get really exciting quickly.

I've added several entertaining surveys to go along with entries on here over the past couple of weeks, and have gotten a great response, however some users have questioned why they immediately get the results for the survey without the ability to pick a choice themselves.

This can happen for several reasons-

• The survey is no longer active. I have start and stop times on the surveys, which allows me to age out surveys and cache the results. I am thinking of ways to add a nice "Survey Closed" notice on them.
• You already answered and have the "I answered" cookie on your machine
• You picked "View Results". Reload the page and you'll get the options again where applicable
• Someone else answered, and the system is correlating them with you because of shared traits (such as the IP address of a shared mega proxy). Even if you don't have the user or answer cookies in your browser, the system may still decide that you must have flushed your cookie cache, and that you've actually already answered. Trying to identify people on the net is a difficult, flawed process, so there will be mistakes.

Web 2.0 is a term that's getting more and more attention these days. Not only positive press by the fawning sheep who think they've personally discovered something amazing and need to bring it to the unwashed, but a lot of negative commentary as well. 

What is Web 2.0? Well it depends on who you talk to - it could be service oriented web technologies (if NTP ran on HTTP, we could call it Web 2.0 pre-1985), community collaboration (e.g. Wikis like wikipedia, group tagging like flickr, etc), or a richer environment courtesy of the more prevalent use of more advanced technologies (like, cough, AJAX - some people, hanging onto Google Suggest's coattails, decided that it was important that they declare a terminology for this "new" technology that had actually been in use for over half a decade).

That last point deserves a bit of attention - why is it that recently some great web applications like Google Maps and Flickr have appeared, offering so much more usability than their predecessors? What technological revolution occurred to make this happen? Did AJAX just get discovered by some researchers who found some magical new way of making browsers sing?

...we've had the so-called AJAX for years, and it has been in use by intranet web teams since the late-90s/early-00s...

The answer, of course, is that we've had the so-called AJAX for years, and it has been in use by intranet web teams since the late-90s/early-00s. It was, however, primarily the domain of teams that could mandate that their userbase would use Internet Explorer, as that browser was the leader (by far - you don't have to love Microsoft to acknowledge this reality) as an interactive web application platform. I had the luxury of making such a declaration, and was developing monitoring and control web applications that used XML data islands, msxml's XMLHttpRequest, client side XML transformations on demand with changing parameters based upon user input, layered transparent graphics for usability, and so on: In real-time you could monitor the status of tens of giant power generators across the continent, and with a click of a button - well along with a confirmation - you could control them. This was about 5 or 6 years ago. I was hardly unique - in fact I've never even considered myself a web developer, and this was just a one-off style solution where the web interface was the best choice, so I took a breather from back-end/database development to build this solution.

So why didn't the technology take off on mainstream websites? One simple reason - Netscape 4.x. Quite a few corporations stuck with their decision to back Netscape in the browser wars - which they backed largely for its theoretical cross-platform advantages - even after Netscape was terribly obsolete and basically dead (for example I did some work for Bell Canada a couple of years ago, and the desktop standard throughout the entire organization was Netscape 4.x. Of course many users figured out where to find the hidden iexplore.exe icon and covertly used it instead). If you made a public website where you couldn't reasonably mandate a particular browser, you developed for the lowest common denominator, and that denominator was Netscape 4.x (even if you had 0 visitors using that browser, it was just good practice to avoid tying to Microsoft's software, so you targeted the cross-platform leader. That leader was Netscape).

Now, of course, the big competitor is Mozilla cum Firefox. Featuring modern DHTML capabilities, XMLHttpRequest functionality, and most of the other major web app functions, and offering full cross-platform functionality, Mozilla completely changed the landscape. Suddenly the "lowest common accessible denominator" was pretty powerful, so there is no reason to hold back empowering your site.