Great point! That’s even better for ROI. Maybe, ROI isn’t a good
way to describe what I really mean. Potential for profit, or potential
for success, based on whatever metric motivated the investment to begin
with, is really what it’s all about. If there’s potential, it’s up to
the people to execute. If the people can’t execute it doesn’t matter
what product(s) were selected.

Which is what I think the problem with the bizarre comparison on Userland. I remember many months ago on some forum or another ticking off things you can’t do with Manila and Winer saying basically that only developers would care about such features, and Manila’s market isn’t developers.

Fine, but then don’t try to imply that Manila’s functionality is on part with other systems at lower cost.

I mean I could put up a list saying:

Brian’s Free CMS: Dreamweaver ($300) + GeoCities free site (Free) + Free site templates from the Web (free)

Manila: Thousands of dollars.

The real thing that irks me is that Manila really isn’t a CMS. It’s a very advanced weblogging tool. If Userland wanted to be more accurate, they should have compared Manila to the TOC of competing weblogging-oriented solutions.

>Great point!  That's even better for ROI.    Maybe, ROI isn't a good
>way to describe what I really mean.  Potential for profit, or potential
>for success, based on whatever metric motivated the investment to begin
>with, is really what it's all about.  If there's potential, it's up to
>the people to execute.  If the people can't execute it doesn't matter
>what product(s) were selected.
>
>I don't want to suggest that more expensive was better, but rather, I
>think saying something is better because it's cheaper up front is
>ridiculous.

The opposite is also true: it’s not better just because it’s more expensive up front. Unfortunately the opinion of the suits that sign the checks is generally not friendly to the less expensive software. Zope has enough popularity among the techies that it’s been able to partially overcome its low price tag.

One of Macrobyte’s biggest problems has always been that we’re small and our software isn’t very expensive. We actually had two entirely unrelated customers customers who signed up for our most expensive dedicated servers, and they were both going to pay for a bunch of custom development work. They decided that the software wasn’t expensive enough and so Macrobyte would probably go out of business, and as a result they cancelled everything and both went with in-house development.

Both customers admitted that our software already did almost everything they wanted, and that in-house development was going to cost them far more than working with Macrobyte and Conversant.

This subject was discussed on my site a year ago. Doesn’t look like anything’s changed since then (alot of the same stuff was said then).

Seth

> On Monday, July 30, 2001 at 3:46 PM, Jim Roepcke wrote:
>
>> I believe you get what you pay for. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to
>> be the case in CMS land — it’s well known in the CMS industry that a
>> high sticker price equals high credibility to executives, regardless of
>> quality (few developers are tricked by this but they aren’t usually the
>> decision makers). Maybe that’s why UserLand is dropping baloney
>> figures, because their industry is so bent they have no choice but to
>> play the game their competitors play.
>
> And yet Zope gets more and more attention, while it’s still free.
>
> There are no rules.
>
> Seth

Great point! That’s even better for ROI. Maybe, ROI isn’t a good
way to describe what I really mean. Potential for profit, or potential
for success, based on whatever metric motivated the investment to begin
with, is really what it’s all about. If there’s potential, it’s up to
the people to execute. If the people can’t execute it doesn’t matter
what product(s) were selected.

I don’t want to suggest that more expensive was better, but rather, I
think saying something is better because it’s cheaper up front is
ridiculous.

Jim

–
Jim Roepcke
Roepcke Computing Solutions
Personal site: http://jim.roepcke.com/

>I believe you get what you pay for. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to
>be the case in CMS land — it’s well known in the CMS industry that a
>high sticker price equals high credibility to executives, regardless of
>quality (few developers are tricked by this but they aren’t usually the
>decision makers). Maybe that’s why UserLand is dropping baloney
>figures, because their industry is so bent they have no choice but to
>play the game their competitors play.

And yet Zope gets more and more attention, while it’s still free.

There are no rules.

Seth