A Precarious Balance

About 7 or 8 years ago, while still calling St. Louis home, I worked at a small consulting company. I was in my early thirties and had been given the job as project lead for a large project. We were to write a back office system for an office supplies wholesaler named Distribution Management Incorporated. I was naive and inexperienced. Thought we ...

You'd think that if your company sold 20 products, you'd be doing pretty well even if it seems like you don't have enough cowboys to wrangle them. I'm not so sure. On occasion, we talked about TurboPower being a Walmart for software. Maybe not Walmart cheap, but Walmart-ish in the way that you could go to TurboPower and find whatever you need for ...

When a product dies, it dies. Sometimes you can extend its life by posting it to a service like SourceForge. But I've seen where that just delays the inevitable. In rare cases, a product can rise from the dead. But it doesn't do so on its own. Near the end of its life, TurboPower had decided to open source the bulk of its products. Geoff ...

Someone had the wisdom to create an advisory board for FlashFiler, TurboPower's client/server database engine for Borland Delphi. We received a lot of feedback from the public newsgroup, most of it positive. But we wanted to give the actively pro-FlashFiler developers the opportunity to more directly influence the product's direction. We'd ...

One of the reasons why customers were deeply involved with FlashFiler, as well as the other TurboPower products, is due to what they received when they purchased a license. Any person purchasing a license for a component library received the source code for that library. TurboPower's main means of communicating with the customers was via its ...

Have you ever realized you're dealing with a customer who knows a lot more than you? That they should be sitting in your seat, working on your product? When I first started working at TurboPower, I ran into that situation. TurboPower sold a client/server database engine called FlashFiler. I was brought into the company to create version 2 of ...

One of the things I've always valued most is hearing from a customer. They help reset your point of view so that it more closely matches reality. Well, this morning my reality is probably a little off. I had wanted to write about customer feedback on pricing, but I don't have any hard data points or evidence. It's never something that I ...