Nick Bradbury has announced that NewsGator will be making future versions of FeedDemon subscription based software. As a developer I certainly see the value of a subscription based business model….when it fits. I’m not so sure it fits in this case, especially after reading this sentence from Greg Reinacker’s post regarding the matter.

…we really feel like this was the way to go, given the challenges we were facing selling (emphasis mine) into consumer, business, and enterprise markets all at once.

Decisions have to be made every day when a company is facing a challenge, especially when trying to integrate a newly acquired company but in this case, the decision does not seem very customer-centric. My feelings are that by doing this Newsgator is able to solve their problems and keep investors happy by creating a revenue stream that will be much more predictable. Unfortunately, this is done at the expense of some customers by moving the focus off of the actual use of the software to the tool itself when in fact it should remain transparent. As developers, no matter how much we would like it to be about the software, it simply isn’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 9:25 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Nick Bradbury has announced that NewsGator will be making future versions of FeedDemon subscription based software. As a developer I certainly see the value of a subscription based business model….when it fits. I’m not so sure it fits in this case, especially after reading this sentence from Greg Reinacker’s post regarding the matter.

…we really feel like this was the way to go, given the challenges we were facing selling (emphasis mine) into consumer, business, and enterprise markets all at once.

Decisions have to be made every day when a company is facing a challenge, especially when trying to integrate a newly acquired company but in this case, the decision does not seem very customer-centric. My feelings are that by doing this Newsgator is able to solve their problems and keep investors happy by creating a revenue stream that will be much more predictable. Unfortunately, this is done at the expense of some customers by moving the focus off of the actual use of the software to the tool itself when in fact it should remain transparent. As developers, no matter how much we would like it to be about the software, it simply isn’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 9:25 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.