A feeling of Deja Vu

A long time ago in a technology far, far, away I used to write these things called Doors that ran on community-based, dial-up, text-based systems called BBSes (yes, before the big bad "Internet"). A BBS was like a website (but not really) where communities got together, posted messages, swaped files and email and played games (sounds like a website huh?). Doors were all the rage and I ran many systems and wrote a bunch of Door games and all was well in the universe.

Along game a man named Tim Stryker who was a bit of a radical, but basically a genius. He (and others) put together a system called MajorBBS (MBBS for short). This was a unique system over traditional BBS systems of the time because rather than spawning off separate processes to run all these Door games available, MBBS would run them as Dynamic Link Librairies (DLLs) and all modules in a system would run in real-time (at first they were actually linked into the system and you had to recompile the system when you bought a new module, crazy huh?). Things like real-time chatting, real-time updates from people playing in games, were now possible with the approach and technology Mr. Stryker and Galacticomm built.

However here's the catch. Building a regular (non-MBBS) Door game was pretty much a no-brainer for a good programmer. There were some frameworks out there that handled the Serial IO for you (remember this is all dial-up, async, 2400 baud and all that) but for the most part you wrote a single player application and only worried about it while it was running. The Door would launch, the user would play, the executable would end and the user was shuffled back to the BBS system from whence he (or she) came. Then Major BBS modules appeared but there was a bit of a catch on building these as you had to now deal with shared memory, be wary of heavy processing and not taking down all the other lines (up to 255 on a single PC!) and stuff like that. Additionally you had to outfit yourself with some pretty specialized tools. Borland C was the only compiler you could use (later Microsoft Visual C was able to do the job), a special memory extender library (PharLap) had to be used, etc.

On top of all that, you also had to buy your MBBS system just to test your code. All in all, I personally invested about $2000-$3000 bucks to build my development environment which was a lot for back then. To offset this, Major BBS developers could charge an arm and leg for their products. Even a simple game like Tic-Tac-Toe (with a chat feature) would sell for hundreds of dollars. I built small RPG games that I sold for over $1000. That's each. And you could get away with selling licenses for more lines. The more lines (users) a BBS wanted, the more your could charge. The short of it was that we could get away with this because it was difficult to build the software, an investment for the environment, and then there was support and the fact that any guy off the street couldn't just sit down one night and say "I'm going to build a MBBS module and make a boatload of cash". A Door developer on the other hand could knock off a pretty decent game in a few days/weeks and sell it for $20 a pop and laugh all the way to the bank.

There are parallels with BBS Door Development that can be done on a shoestring and say writing ASP.NET web apps using free tools today. I can download the .NET SDK for free and compile my system. Web Matrix isn't a bad tool. I can deploy or sell my web solution or I could build .NET client applications using something like SharpDevelop. In other words, I can build the Doors of yesterday today with .NET and some cheap (free) tools. With Web Parts and SharePoint the experience is very much like what we went through with Major BBS development. You need a specialized environment (Windows Server 2003). You need a specific IDE (Visual Studio .NET although you *might* be able to use something like SharpDevelop). You need to develop right on the server or else put up with very complicated ways of remote debugging (trust me, debugging with PharLap and protected memory dumps was no picnic either). You need to know a lot of about how SharePoint works, what works (and what doesn't) and how to twist it to do your bidding. Development in SharePoint is not a walk in the park and can be expensive to setup and work with.

Why am I telling you all this? I'm seeing the MBBS trend happen again but this time in the SharePoint space. No, people are not writing Door games for SharePoint (although that does entice my already overtaxed project list). There are however lots of niche products coming out and while some are great, some not so great, they're (for the most part) expensive. I'm also not talking about expensive as in comparing them to 1980s prices or through inflation but just the fact that a small widget (or set of widgets) that does something useful (say backup files, deploys changes to your SharePoint sites, provides better than basic workflow, etc.) is pretty costly for what it does.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for free enterprise and making money however I just look across the SharePoint tool and Web Part space and feel a little deja vu coming on. Again, there is an investment here and a return that companies want to see on that investment. However it just *feels* costly for a few Web Parts. Maybe it's me, maybe times have changed, but is it really worth thousands of dollars to a company to purchase an out of the box Recycle Bin for SharePoint? Sure there are free tools and low(er) cost Tools, Web Parts, and Solutions coming out as well but my gut feel is that when you direct someone to a commercial product more often than not it's going to cost a few bucks to get that tool. I look at just a sampling of a lot of tools and we're talking $5k, $10k, and up for many of them.

Again, I'm not trying to paint everyone with a single brush and I guess cost is relative and in the grand scheme of things, some companies have that kind of money to invest and don't see it as a large outlay. I just feel like I'm back in 1980 where we, the MBBS developers, could charge 10 times more for a module than a BBS door just because we knew how to build them. I might be alone in my thoughts here but hey, it's my blog and I'll ramble if I want to.