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The Economics of PIMs
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Posted by Neville Franks
Jun 7, 2009 at 01:32 PM
A few others issues to ponder. Over the years it has become easier and cheaper for most anyone to dabble in writing software. Many developers produce a product with little to no forethought about how they will market and sell it. They think that all they need do is write it, set up a web site and the money will come rolling in. Add to this free open source software and you have so many products available that the companies who are serious professional development companies have an ever increasingly difficult time selling their products and thus sustaining a viable business.
Further the free open source software movement devalues the work we do and creates an expectation that all software should be free or is overpriced. And because software is just some bits of a data on disk it doesn’t have a tangible value to many people, who are happy to pirate it. Most people have absolutely no idea long it takes to produce a “good” software product and the associated costs. To run a business these costs must be recovered.
It is very difficult to build a business selling $30 software unless it is mass market or you have a range of products to sell. One support request and their goes any profit.
An annual renewal or upgrade plan can be very effective. People will not renew unless new and useful versions are released, so it is clearly in the developers best interests to continue developing the product. But feature bloat and adding features just so new versions can be released does not server anyone well.
Our customers can assist us and help our businesses to prosper by acting us marketing agents for us. For example recommending products to friends, posting on blogs and forums and generally becoming our advocates,
PS. An earlier post here struck me re. the inability to edit posts. It is difficult to have any expectations of the site owner as he is providing a free service. And free has little value. If the forums users donated funds or payed an annual subscription then an off-the-shelf commercial forum package could be used.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jun 7, 2009 at 07:41 PM
Neville, I’m glad to see you join the discussion.
Your own product, Surfulater, has developed very well over the years. I am using it as my main web capture software because it does the most accurate job of page capture, as well as having additional metadata capabilities.
I have, in fact, many times mentioned Surfulater on Twitter. My hope is that some of that has turned into good business for you.
I have two major requests, which if granted, would made Surfulater perfect for me.
The first is whether it is possible to add a feature that allows more than one article to be open at the same. My purpose in clipping is primarily to support my writing - it helps to sometimes have two or more articles opened up, and to be writing in yet another window.
The second request is to develop the ability to connect with browsers other than IE and FF.
Ideally, it would be nice to have a universal capture mechanism that would work with all programs so that, say, I could clip as easily from a wp or presentation program as I do from FF.
In any event, thanks for first rate software. I do appreciate your work and generosity of spirit.
Daly
Posted by Neville Franks
Jun 8, 2009 at 07:50 AM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Neville, I’m glad to see you join the discussion.
>
>I have two
>major requests, which if granted, would made Surfulater perfect for me.
>
>The first
>is whether it is possible to add a feature that allows more than one article to be open at
>the same. My purpose in clipping is primarily to support my writing - it helps to
>sometimes have two or more articles opened up, and to be writing in yet another
>window.
You can view multiple articles in the same folder using Ctrl+Click to select them.Similarly Shift+Click or Shift+Down Arrow selects a group of articles. ie. Standard Windows UI. And of course selecting a folder displays all of its articles.
>The second request is to develop the ability to connect with browsers other
>than IE and FF.
>
>Ideally, it would be nice to have a universal capture mechanism that
>would work with all programs so that, say, I could clip as easily from a wp or
>presentation program as I do from FF.
Surfulater’s Clipboard Hotkeys let you capture content from any Windows Application. See the Help Topic: The Basics|Creating New Articles from the Clipboard for more information.
I feel that the best place for these discussions is on the Surfulater support forums: http://www.softasitgets.com/forums
>In any event, thanks for first rate software. I
>do appreciate your work and generosity of spirit.
Thanks.
Posted by Cassius
Jun 10, 2009 at 11:35 PM
1. Neville is correct: PIMs are dirt cheap now. They once cost $100s or more
2. He’s also right about programming time. One thinks one has been at a keyboard for 20 minutes and finds it’s been hours.
3. I’m glad to learn of the Surfulater advances. I tried it when it was first introduced, but decided to stick with myBase, partly because I had so much info already stored in it…1.21 GB now.
-c