Friday, October 29, 2004

Calendaring woes in real life. There has been a bunch of talk on the calendaring standards lists about how to handle time zones, and sure enough, last week I ran into a real-world example that pointed out the issues (but not the answers) in maddening fashion. The Educause 2004 conference web site has an Itinerary Builder where you can select which conference events to attend... [Oren Sreebny's Weblog] 10:49:53 PM    comment []

S5 - at last, a good web-based presentation package. Last week for my presentation on Chandler and the CSG at Educause 2004 I used Eric Meyer's S5 package instead of Powerpoint for the first time. It worked like a charm! In case you're wondering, S5 stands for the "simple standards-based slide show system", which simply explains what it is. I love the fact that it's entirely web standards compliant,... [Oren Sreebny's Weblog] 10:49:45 PM    comment []

October 26, 2004. Ipswitch's IMail customers seem to be in open revolt over a new pricing scheme. IMail is a popular email server for Windows-based servers. Ipswitch is a normally smart company in Massachusetts. This story will be interesting to follow for anyone making pricing decisions about software and trying to move upmarket. Disclosure: We use IMail for email at Fog Creek Software. The only reason we were using IMail is for historical reasons, when we only wanted to have one public-facing server, and it had to be Windows so it could run FogBugz. Now that FogBugz is available for Linux, and, more importantly, we can afford to run as many servers as we want, IMail is a lot less compelling than Postfix or qmail, which are free. Now, on to Ipswitch's new price strategy. Clearly, management was drooling over the Exchange/Notes market and wondered why Microsoft was getting so much more money for Exchange than they were getting for IMail, and they probably misunderstood the reason. What they were thinking was, "oh, Exchange has all these other collaboration features besides email. Let's add some collaboration features and then we can charge as much as Exchange. In fact if we even go halfway towards the price of Exchange and be an even better value than Exchange. Mo' money, mo' money, mo' money!" First mistake: they underestimated how much more Microsoft can charge for the same junk simply because Microsoft is the market leader. In MBA terms, Microsoft can capture a larger portion of the consumer surplus because they're the true market leader, a "safe" choice, and they have a worldwide sales force about 200 times larger than the entire staff of Ipswitch. These are people who spend every minute of every day explaining to customers why Exchange is great even if it isn't. Second, Ipswitch misunderstood that Microsoft is in the market for Large Corporate Email Systems and Ipswitch is in the market for small-medium ISPs and smaller businesses without dedicated IT staffs. These are two different markets with very different willingnesses to pay. The second mistake was a fundamental pricing blunder of misframing the value equation. The price of software has very little to do with cost, and everything to do with perceived value. The classic book about pricing is Nagle and Holden's The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Profitable Decision Making, a book which is offered in hardback and paperback, with the paperback sold at a higher price than the hardback in a brilliant pricing strategy (Thomas Nagle practices what he preaches). And one interesting point in this book is that customers perception of value is always based on comparisons to some baseline. IPSwitch was hoping their ISP customers, who have never remotely considered using Exchange due to the extremely high per-user cost, would compare their new price to Exchange, but of course, what they really compared it to was the price of the old version of their product, with which it compared very unfavorably. By the way, if you're wondering what a good example of this strategy is, look at the four editions of Microsoft Visual Studio. There's a super expensive "Enterprise Architect" edition at the top of the line that hardly anyone ever buys; it's only there to make the other prices look reasonable by comparison. Consumers don't really know how to judge the value of software so well, so they grope around for nearby products to use as baselines. Pricing 101 says you give them something really expensive to think about so your product seems cheaper by comparison and thus a better value. If Ipswitch really wanted to compete against Exchange and Notes, first of all, they shouldn't be competing on price in that market, because IPSwitch does not have any inherent price advantage. In fact Microsoft probably has the price advantage in that market because they can distribute development costs over so many more customers and they already have a sunk cost of a huge marketing force. Never compete on price when you don't have a price advantage. If you're the small company, you don't have the price advantage. And secondly, Ipswitch shouldn't be abandoning their existing market to chase after an elusive new market in which they're going head-on against Microsoft and IBM (Lotus Notes). They can't win that way. There's a Will and Grace episode that proves it. My sources inform me that this was a decision made by the MBAs in the company over the strong objections of the developers. It's ironic that the MBAs don't even get the basic MBA stuff right; this is entirely a bad move for reasons that business school graduates should be able to figure out without understanding the technology at all. [Joel on Software] 10:49:33 PM    comment []

Federated Search Comes to Purdue University Professional Reading Shelf Federated Search Source: The Exponent Federated Search Comes to Purdue University "Michael Fosmire, associate professor of library science, said that the lack of depth and reliability in Google's search results should make students wary. To help give students access to information that has gone through some process of peer review, Fosmire assisted the library in creating a 'megasearch' tool." -- Online Information Source: Science Advisory Board Scientists Frustrated with Limited Access to Full-Text Documents "While scientists often cite staying abreast of developments in their field as the most common reason for reading scientific literature, it is by far from the only reason. 'Scientists perceive their ability to access scientific and medical literature almost as an unalienable right of their profession,' observes Tamara Zemlo, Ph.D., MPH, Director of The Science Advisory Board. The Internet has reinforced this perception by increasing the speed and ease by which these searches can be conducted." Thanks to OCLC Abstracts for the news tip. -- Digital Preservation--United Kingdom Source: JISC JISC Announces 1 Million Pounds Digital Preservation Programme "The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) announced today that it is making grants totalling more than 1 million pounds to nine UK educational institutions and their partners to support digital preservation and asset management in UK Higher and Further Education institutions." -- Divine Andrew 'Flip' Filipowski Source: The Business Ledger (IL) The Rise and Fall of a Dot-Com Pioneer From the where-are-they-now file. "In the 18 months since Andrew 'Flip' Filipowski's watched as his high-tech incubator-turned-integrator, Divine Interventures Inc., was sold in pieces at a bankruptcy auction, he has regained several of his former companies, created a new entity -- SilkRoad Technologies, Inc. -- and found new challenges and success in North Carolina.... RoweCom, Inc. sued Divine in early February 2003, charging that Divine had fraudulently transferred $73.7 million from RoweCom into its own accounts, according to court documents filed in Boston. RoweCom claimed that those transfers forced it to default on its duties to pay for magazine and journal subscriptions that its customers -- many of them universities and libraries -- had ordered and paid for. Both RoweCom and Divine were facing lawsuits at that time from a group of libraries and publishers and the New York attorney general. A settlement is now being hammered out in bankruptcy court. Divine has consistently denied any charges of fraud or mismanagement." See Also: Citing divine, AIP Wants Payment On Time (via LJ) - gary [ResourceShelf] 10:47:32 PM    comment []

October 27, 2004. Pure CSS Slideshows CSS expert Eric Meyer came up with a pretty awesome slide show system called S5: “S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.” Even cooler, CityDesk expert Brian Cantoni created a very slick CityDesk template for S5 so you don't even have to know HTML. CityDesk is free for sites with less than 50 files which should be enough for most presentations, so this is a pretty cool free, standards-compliant improvement on PowerPoint that lets you put your presentations on the web. IIS Bug I am completely at wit's end debugging this strange (apparent) IIS bug... ... Update: Fixed! So far, at least. Since it's one of those intermittent things I can't be 100% sure yet, but it looks like Tim Chaffee got it right: "I would look at the MTS/COM+ package that IIS creates when you choose HIGH isolation. What user is that configured to use? It may be IWAM And you may need to switch it to the user you need." That seems to be it. If you look in the Component Services control panel, it is indeed the case that the COM+ application that IIS created has its identity set to the IWAM_Machinename account. Changing that fixed the problem. I've moved the whole story here. Thanks to Sean Timm, Yakov Shafranovich, Simon Fell, Mike Surel, Sasha Do, Mike Openshaw, Marcus Tucker, Max Skibinsky, Scott Durow, John Christensen, Tim Chaffee, Steven Afdahl, Nick Parker, John Waterson, Beau Hartshorne, Olivier Dagenais, Gil Bahat, Robert MacLean, Nicole Calinoiu, Scott Wisniewski, Matthew Randle, Lars Bergstrom, Sikko2Go, Glenn Deschen, Brendan Tompkins, Bill Loytty, Sean Wheeler, and Justin Bowler for their helpful and intelligent suggestions. [Joel on Software] 10:39:23 PM    comment []

It's Hard to Sell Ads to Plumbers. For some odd reason I find the Yellow Pages interesting, always have. There's something about them that just reeks of...opportunity. Apparently Google agrees. They inked a deal with BellSouth's Yellow Pages unit, a deal which let's BellSouth resell AdWords. In other words, this is a new strategy for Google - BellSouth is the first ever company to have rights to resell Google's AdWords. If it works, it may have far reaching implications. So why did they do it? Local, local, local. It's very hard to sell AdWords to plumbers. The Yellow Pages have reps who already sell ads to them. It's all about the trenches in the Local market. I've covered the YP before, here and here and here. Release in extended entry. Also, see SEW coverage.... [John Battelle's Searchblog] 10:37:08 PM    comment []