joeysmith's Journal: Small Pieces Loosely Joined

We recently installed a copy of Windows XP at the office. The guy doomed to use XP pined for a decent implementation of multiple desktops (Microsoft and NVidia both have one, but they're really resource intensive), which reminded me that I have a license to goScreen.

This is a great example of a small piece of software that is really well written, frequently updated with new features without requiring hardware upgrades to run the new version, and I only had to buy it once...after that, I was a lifetime owner.

Poikosoft's Easy CD-DA used to be in this same category, but now I have to pay AGAIN for every major version change...and yet, the number of features that would compel me to pay for an upgrade are suprisingly missing. Between versions 4.0 and 6.0, their software made leaps and bounds in improvements. At 6.0, they stopped giving former purchases access to new versions (which seems to be a violation of the agreement we had when I originally purchased the software, but what can you do?). About that same time, the quality of the software stopped improving and pretty much stood still.I would be interested to know more about the business end of these two packages...how much money they make, how many people actually constantly pay to upgrade, and so on.

Stardock seems to have found a way to make the "Small but Written Well" model work, as has the guy behind goScreen. I had thought that we were going to try and go that same route, but instead we're facing the same problem my last trip through the startup merry-go-round faced: We're trying to be a monolithic "everything in one package" solution for every potential customer.

I just don't think that's the way to win.