The Agile Micro ISV Blog

Image by alexkingorg via Flickr

Seldom
does a change in day job generate a vast amount of excitement for the
professional freelancer. It’s always interesting to move to a new
project, overcome new challenges etc., but an office is an office and a
project is a project.

I set the backdrop to illustrate by counterpoint just how psyched I am about what I’m going to be doing. As of next week, I will be working for Microsoft Research on the Chem4Word project. I’ll be based in The Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at Cambridge University. My passions for science and software have never clashed like this – I quite literally cannot wait.

With great interest, I’ve been watching the unfolding drama that kicked off with this post on 37Signals, later followed by this response from GetSatisfaction.

In
case you missed its arrival, GetSatisfaction is a really nice web app
focused on facilitating open conversations between businesses and
customers on a level playing field. The essence of Jason’s complaint on
the 37Signals blog is this:

I’m going to use (everyone’s friend) Bob Walsh as an example. Bob’s awesome task management application, MasterList Professional is sold by his company, Safari Software
Inc. Now, let’s say that Dave, a customer of Bob’s pops across to the
GetSatisfaction website. He searches for Bob’s company but can’t find
it. Now here’s the interesting part; Dave can, without Bob’s knowledge,
set up a support site for Safari Software and MasterList, and ask a
question on it.

So what does Bob do? Nothing. Why? Because he has
no idea that this unofficial support site exists, let alone that one of
his customers is asking for help there. Now that doesn’t seem like a
nice state of affairs does it?

That wasn’t the only (or even the
main) problem. On Bob’s unofficial support site, GetSatisfaction might
use Bob’s company name, even his logo, making it seem quite official.
What really rubbed Jason up the wrong way, was the badge that
GetSatisfaction placed on the GetSatisfaction website.


Clearly the suggestion is that if you’re not signed up for GetSatisfaction, you’re not doing open the open conversation thing.

This
has been something on my mind since I started using the service. I do
use GetSatisfaction for Home Document Manager, and I like it. It’s a
good app, and integrates well with product websites. But there has
always been a subtle undertone of ‘participate here or be excluded’.

To
participate fully on GetSatisfaction, you also need to get a premium
account, and they’re not cheap. In fact, they’re pretty pricey,
especially for a micro ISV.
Their basic plan starts at $99/month. They used to offer a $49/month
starter subscription, but I couldn’t find it just now, there has been a
bit of a redesign, so it may have vanished altogether.

But
whether the price was $49 or $99 per month, it would still be the
single biggest outlay after my office. And that just doesn’t
seem….right. $49/year and I would sign up in a heartbeat, but $49 is
insanely pricey, for what it is. And $99/month is just….silly.

If
GetSatisfaction are truly comitted to facilitating open conversations,
they should offer all companies a free, single user pro account, so
that small companies can compete on the ‘level playing field’ that
GetSatisfcation seems so keen on. If they got the buy in from startups,
they would no doubt make the income as the startups grew.

They
offer a good service, but I think that a single free pro account to
each company would go a long way to losing the “mafioso protection”
image that Jason was writing of.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

…I’ve just added one to Home Document Manager.

.Net isn’t renowned for it’s cold startup times, and WPF
apps start like standard .Net app after a horse tranquilizer. Home
Document Manager has an ever increasing list of assemblies that it
needs to import at startup and that takes time. This is on top of the
whole WPF stack.

.Net 3.5 SP1 introduced a new SplashScreen
class. You can set the SplashScreen by adding an image to your project
and setting its build properties, or you can use the class directly. I
find this new class a little flaky, as it can throw exceptions under
certain circumstances if it loses focus.

It does raise the question of what to show on a splash screen. Just a fancy graphic/logo? Version info? Website info?