I think GinG has some good points. My product has many OS competitors, but we're doing very well so far. I think alot of it has to do with thinking as "corporate" customers think about software.
Making the UI pretty is important, especially if your product is targeted at less geeky types and/or needs approval of a less geeky type. When the front line person who found your product and likes it goes into a meeting to get approval for the money how will your screenshots look up on a screen inside a PPT slide?
Support, support, support. While most active OS projects have good support in the forums that's not what corporate users want. They want to know that YOU are going to answer their questions. They want a contact, they want assurance that someone will help them.
Create a great marketing site. Most OS software have very poor websites that barely even explain what they do. That's OK, because us geeks fight through that or in most cases know what the software does before we even get to the website. Not the case with non-tech users or general folks looking for software. They want to figure what your software does on the first page or at worst after a (nicely done) tour. And again, make sure the site passes the boss test.
Oh and of course you still need to make a great product! I'm only talking about how to market against OS competitors, but if potential customers download your product and don't like it, nothings going to get you the sale.
Well the Wall Street Programmer (WSP) is on his 4th post and I'm officially addicted! His latest is on salaries down on The Street. Why do I love this? Because I've tried to explain how things work down there to non New Yorkers and well .... they just don't get it (my fault, I lack the proper vocab). My man WSP though hits the nail on the head. Another great read.
I also love whenever I find another interesting NY blogger. Not to many out there :-(
I agree 100% with Jason on this. Adam Curry needs to strip the DSC of all the mashups/promos and just give us him talking. I'd much rather have 15 minutes of that than 49 minutes of both where I end up hitting fast forward on my shuffle the entire time, which is kind of a pain. Maybe this is why I like morning coffee notes so much?
Also big props to Jason for the excellent Howard Stern analogy.
-- off topic --
Oh and you all should go out and purchase some Sirius stock ASAP, because the Howard PR machine is gearing up and it's going to be big. Then you need to sell as soon as he hits the air.
Topix.net now includes blogs in their search, very cool. This blog is in there which is even cooler! If you want to add your blog I think you just send the request through the regular feedback form:
A new blog by a programmer down on Wall Street. Could be interesting. I almost took a job down there when I got out of college. It's an amazing part of the world. As his second post eludes to, its a life experience being down there during the morning rush.
There's also the wonder that is 2 starbucks directly facing each other.
"At this point I was pretty sure this was a social engineering attack, so I started to quiz her about why she needed the information. She said it was for a "security check". I told her I was uncomfortable giving out information like this to a cold caller over the phone and she said it was nothing to worry about because it was all covered by "the data protection act".
I said that I would rather conduct my business in an Orange shop, and she told me that she would have to put a mark on my record that I had failed a security check. I interpreted this as a threat, which convinced me that the call was an attempted con. I asked for her name and ended the call."
I didn't even know there was a SQL Server 2005 Express, much less that it's free. Is this new?
One of the things I'm hoping to work on is support for SQL Server 2005. I'd like to get support for that into HelpSpot in a 1.X release. From what I've read I should be OK in my application code, what I'm most worried about is if the PHP MSSQL extension is up for the challenge.
If that goes OK hopefully I'll be able to support Express as well. What a great option for small installations where you want the enterprise features but don't have the $$. It seems to have everything I need like transactions and full text indexing.
It has pretty decent limits (1 cpu, 1 gig ram, 4 gigs data) which should be fine for most small installations.
Some of you who've been hanging around here for a while may remember my article on SEO. I really enjoy SEO and it's been fun this last week or so being able to start planning my strategies for the UserScape site.
I thought I'd share some information on a really cool tool Google has just launched which can REALLY help you with your SEO. First, to access the tool you'll need to have an Adwords account. You'll probably want one of these anyway for your business so go sign up. I think they only charge your credit card for $5 initially so it's not a big deal.
Now, when you finally get in go under the "campaign management" tab to "tools". Here you'll see the new top link is the Keyword Tool. This tool is just fantastic. What it does is allow you to put in a term you're optimizing for (or buying ads for) and it shows you other keywords which are similar that people search on. In addition, it shows you how often the term is searched (relative to others) and how much advertising competition there is for the term. Let's take a look:
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Here you can see I ran "help desk software" through the tool. It returned several other more specific keywords to consider as well as some other related, but less exact options. The real value though is in the other two columns. We can see which terms are most searched on an interestingly which ones are most coveted by advertisers. Those full green bars for "help desk software" are why I won't be buying an ad campaign for that anytime soon!! Prices often reach $30 A CLICK.
SEO however is free and this is a great tool for researching the focus of your SEO efforts. It's also a good tool for figuring out how competitive the organic listings are and hence how difficult it will be to rank high for different words. As you can imagine, with that much advertiser interest the term "help desk software" is probably highly competitive for organic listings. On the other hand the tool can help expose where there may be opportunities to optimize for less competitive phrases that can still be profitable.