Jesse Ezell Blog

Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat. We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700). Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore. [1]

Recently the discussion came up about using .NET 2.0 in some future products. I work on server products, and we've been using 2.0 there for a while. However, there is a bit of concern around deploying the 2.0 framework with our desktop apps. Our software is shipped ESD style and a lot of customers like to download the trial app before making the purchase. If they try to install the app, but can't because they need to be an administrator to install the .NET framework 2.0, we probably just lost out on the sale. I would venture to guess that a significant chunk of our customers fall into the non-administrator group, so this is a big problem.

It's been out for years now. Guess what, on the official central page, you can chose from a vast array of 22 central applications now (including the ones Macromedia released back in 2003), the last of which was made available over a year ago. This represents a total of 12 people who bought into the whole Central develpment thing. For a company as big as Macromedia, that is beyond sad. It's almost laughable. But, it's not suprising. I told you this would happen. Will Apollo fair any better? We'll just have to wait and see if they have a better licensing model this time around.

It's official. We just shipped our first desktop product coded from the ground up on top of the .NET Framework: Engage (http://www.articulate.com/engage.html). Engage lets you create Flash based interactions. It's pretty slick for rapidly creating compelling training content. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Via JD:

On2, the guys behind the latest video codec in Flash, are celebrating some live streaming stuff. I agree, the codec is nice. What isn't nice is the rediculous licensing costs to use the codec. Note to Macromedia/Adobe: if you are going to try to make an open file format, write the codecs yourself. Don't allow the company that you license your codec from to rape all your customers with rediculous licensing fees.

"Making Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 Rising Star list is a testament to a company's strategic vision," said Stephen DiPietro, Audit Partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Articulate has exhibited its commitment and ability to innovate over the past three years, and Deloitte salutes their accomplishments." [1]

Very interesting story about MySpace that claims that MySpace's success has more to do with spam and PR than anything else: