“RE: Help with Macrobyte's Future”

1. Hosting is evil. Maybe that's just me. But people expect hosting to be very low cost if not free and they expect performance and uptime and quick response to trouble (or perceived trouble).

When you're hosting you're also answering people's questions about the software -- How do I?... kind of questions. So you can't do hosting without software support.

It seems to me that people (in general) don't value a CMS when they can't see it. If they interact with it only via the Web, they sort of assume that it must be very cheap to run. It's not, of course.

2. That Conversant runs in Radio is of huge importance. That means people only need $40 for the platform. Excellent.

But you run into this serious issue -- you're competing with two UserLand CMSes, not just one. Radio contains a CMS. And of course UserLand wants people to buy Manila/Frontier.

With such a small community, having the support of UserLand is important. What would selling Conversant for Radio do to your relationship with UserLand? I won't guess, but if I were you I'd probably want to have a good idea in advance.

3. The Zope guys had funding. If I recall correctly, it was their VCs that convinced them to open-source Zope.

4. When attracting developers, consider in advance how you'll answer the following questions that might reasonably be asked:

a. Can I write in Perl/Python/Java -- some language I know already?

b. Does the database support transactions?

c. Why tie up my data in a proprietary database format?

d. Why use a database that doesn't understand SQL? SQL is totally a standard.

e. Ummmmm, Linux?

f. Can I run it behind Apache?

g. Is the SAX API available? I'm a SAX fan.

h. My boss says we have to do XSLT. Does it do XSLT?

i. How many connections/second can it handle?

j. Are you going to disappear? Is UserLand going to disapper?

k. Why should we pay anything at all when the stuff from the Apache group (or whatever) is so damn good?

l. Does it import from Quark?

m. Can I create PDFs from my Conversant websites?

n. Does it do document management, not just content management? In other words, everyone at the office writes in Word, and we want to serve those files and be able to discuss them. We want the Word docs to be readable as HTML in a Web browser.

o. Isn't Manila easier to use for the novice? We have a bunch of less-than-savvy folks here at the office.

p. Would you consider changing the name to something sexier so I can convince my boss to buy it? He would like "Vignette StoryServer" as a name better than "Macrobyte Conversant."

q. What the hell's the difference between an "object database" and an "object-oriented database" and which do you use?