There are quite a few things about being a software vendor that puzzle me. One is striking a balance between number of employed software engineers vs. number of products sold.
I've been in a couple of situations where the ratio of products to programmers seemed to high. The situation that sticks out most in my mind is TurboPower. During my employment there was an average of 10 developers working on just over 20 products. A ratio of 2:1 in favor of products.
The picture was complicated by each product supporting two Borland IDEs (Delphi and C++Builder) as well as several versions of each IDE. Each product release needed some kind of compatibility testing with each version of the supported IDEs. And our time was further restricted by our choice to have the programmers also do the technical support, for free.
How did it feel? It felt good to have some variety. At one point, my team was working on three products: FlashFiler, XMLPartner, and Internet Professional.
But it also felt like we could never do enough. While our products were good, it didn't seem like they were the best. It looked like smaller competitors were less spread out and able to focus more time on their product, making it the best, or closer to the best in that niche.
Why do I even bring up "being the best". Sure, it's nice to have a product that sells well. But that's not enough. Whatever I make, I want it to be the best. I want the competitors to be worried about catching up to me, not the other way around. Spreading my time around didn't seem to help.
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Sean Winstead
Tags: ISV, Software