Perhaps a bit crude, but terrorist plots are potential big business for small ISV's. The world was already heading for an offsite workforce, but these threats will greatly speed up that process. Not because of the fear, but the inconvenience. Is there any doubt we're heading for a world where no electronic devices are allowed in carry on bags? I think it's a no brainer. At that point every consultant out there just lost half their productive time as they flip through magazines on 12 hours flights instead of working.
What ideas do you have that might ease that transition?
A few months back I did a post on potential markets for new ISV's. The one which got the most ridicule was celebrity gossip. Looks like I wasn't so crazy after all:
After much internal debate, I've finally moved this blog over to Expression Engine by pMachine. Wordpress served me well, but it was time to move on. I first considered upgrading to wp2 but it seemed like a lot of work so I figured I'd look around and see if anything else caught my eye. EE was first on my list to check out since I had just finished redoing my back end systems using their fine Code Ignitor framework.
EE is far more powerful than WP and I'm looking forward to taking advantage of some of those features down the road. Also I figured it was time to move this blog to something that had more formal support. Some of the posts on this blog have generated 10K+ revenues for HelpSpot and when you have that kind of money riding on a blog post it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy to know there's somebody to call if it breaks.
There were really only 2 tricky parts. First was converting all my posts. I don't really understand why but EE can't convert from WP so you first have to export to Movable Type format and then it can import that. There seem to be 2 scripts out there which do this, though only this one worked for me. The other big hurdle was setting up all the 301 redirects since the URL structures are different and there was no nice way to make the EE ones like WP ones. I'm hopefully that I have all that setup right but we'll see. If not you won't be reading this :-)
Just the other day I was thinking about hiring a Windows programmer type to make a decent PHP installer for me, because the current one is unusable. It doesn't install any of the modules so it's totally worthless. My customers are then forced to do a manual installation, which is tricky to say the least.
Well it seems that those fine devs who work on PHP have beat me to the punch and are working on one for PHP 5.2. A few details are here. There's a more in depth discussion here.
Just taking a quick look at my last 10 trials, 9 of 10 were Windows and I'm 100% sure my conversions would go up significantly if PHP was easier to install on Windows.
I sort of agree, but I think he's a little too broad that desktop applications will always be better. There are some types of applications which simply cannot be done from a desktop app and hence they cannot be better and others where the benefit of being online outweighs the supperior desktop UI.
One thing I think fosters this type of reaction is how the web 2.0 zealots insist that ajax will replace the desktop and how they try and make all their applications replicate the functionality of desktop apps. To me ajax should be used to smooth out the rough spots in the normal web UI, not replace it with a poor desktop replica. HelpSpot now has dozens of places where ajax is used, but there's very few of them where you'd really notice unless you were looking for it. It's just used to make the UI a bit smoother in spots not to completely prevent page refreshes or other silly goals.
Jeremy thinks if JotSpot stopped calling themselves a wiki they'd do better. I think if they offered a hosted version they'd do better. It's far too powerful a system at this point to only be sold to organizations that have no IT departments and have no data security concerns.
I'd also note that I used to hate the JotSpot idea, but they've really developed it nicely and I think it could be even bigger if they provided a self hosted "enterprise" solution.
"If you think open source is the end-all of software development, show me the open source equivalents of Photoshop, ProTools, DreamWeaver, MS Office, PageMaker, BBEdit, World of Warcraft, QuickBooks, FinalCutPro, Performer, and thousands of other successful applications. For every product I listed there are many viable commercial alternatives, but only a few open source ones. The few that exists can not match the capability or raw development speed of their commercial counterparts."
Great post by Rick. Says what I always try to say but does it much more eloquently. Please leave your flaming replies on his blog ;-)
Update: I recommend reading the comments, some good stuff in there. Matt Mullenweg (guy who started Wordpress) chimes in and Rick does a most excellent job of responding.
I'm helping support Baruch's efforts with Planet MicroISV by putting up a HelpSpot ad for the next three months. That's not the final ad, but a placeholder until I get the properly sized one created.
If you haven't seen Planet MicroISV you should check it out. It's a nice aggregator of small ISV blogs all in one place. If your blog should be there, but isn't make sure to let him know.