“RE: Help with Macrobyte's Future”

Speaking from my experience with Frontier, Manila, & Conversant: 1. Package your product around an easily explainable function (Intranet CMS, bug tracking, weblog + discussion group, whatever fits) 2. Protect me from UserLand

About a year ago, I was looking for an intranet CMS for our company. I wanted weblog/calendar functionality, in-the-browser editing, and a discussion group. I had a hard time figuring out exactly what Frontier, Manila, and Conversant each did, their relationship to each other, and what they were each good for. The whole hairball (now with Radio and RCS) is difficult to get your arms around. It's part of the nature of the "do everything tool", and platforms like Zope have the same difficulty, but there's definitely room to craft a description & graceful introduction for each of these systems!

Ultimately, I thought that Manila gave me the 3 features I needed (calendar, editing, discussion group), and I didn't see that adding a 3rd party product (Conversant) was going to add anything. I also wanted behind-the-firewall functionality, not a hosted solution.

We messed around with Frontier & Manila for weeks, customizing the code for our intranet needs. We even took a Frontier class. We always had performance problems, and after mucking around for weeks, it became apparent that Dave @ Userland was off in a different direction (with what became Radio), and that he was not interested in continuing to develop and support what we needed -- a low-cost intranet CMS solution. As a fellow software developer, Dave's daily software update cycle and cavalier attitude towards planning frightened me. We eventually abandoned the work.

So a vendor who (1) had a clear vision of what kind of product they were making and (2) was more regular about support/updates than userland is what would appeal to me.

So here's my advice. It's worth what you paid for it:

Package up the 9 different products into one. Give it a single useful benefit, even if it's still a toolkit that's harder to describe than an app. I have no idea what that would be -- makes Radio development faster, makes it more robust, makes it easier to use, better UI, gives you the out-of-the-box functionality to do bug tracking or sales pipeline management or whatever's appropriate. Market it to Userland/Radio users as some super duper useful add-on of some sort, and market it to normal people just for the functionality, and make Frontier optional.

As a final note, good guerilla marketing doesn't take a lot of money. It takes very clearly explaining what your product is good for, and making it deep and useful and fun to use. Most software companies have a very hard time describing what they do. If you're doing something new, it's hard. We've been at it for three years and are still making our product description clearer.

Good luck!

John Troyer

Neomar