Design Limbo

In my previous post I talked about Neil Davidson’s book about software pricing. One of the principals in one of the final chapters was trying to convey how much your software cost to make, or how much of an investment you’ve put into it. Which I took to heart and tried to analyze one of my newest projects to see how much it cost me to develop it. I failed.

There are a couple of reasons I don’t believe that I was successful on trying to get my cost out of my project. I first tried looking for a software product that I could use to do this for me, by analyzing my codebase and letting me plug in additional numbers, there weren’t any.

Failing to find a white software knight I turned to the OSS community to look for solutions, as I know Ohloh has something that estimates cost for OSS projects called OhCount, it wouldn’t work for me being a MS developer, and there weren’t any other OSS tools that would work against my codebase, or that worked at all on my box.

Most tools I found were metric or analysis tools for your codebase, these are Lines of Code tools. This sounds great but not all code is equal. For example my XAML code is harder for me to write then C# code, so it’s actually more expensive for me to write XAML then C#, as it takes more time and resources.

One of the key software project cost estimation formula are is the COCOMO/COCOMO II cost model, which if applied correctly I think can get you into the ballpark of your software projects cost.

Cost estimation in software projects is a huge area and a major problem and you will never be 100% accurate. There will always be cost that you miss, or items that you over-estimate and if you have more then one person working on your project then using a straight LoC formula won’t take into account that developers strengths and weaknesses in relation to the code they are working on.

My software project isn’t finished and here are my basic COCOMO metrics:

I’ve only been working on the project for about 2 1/2 months and then only few a few hours here and there, but in a way I think it could line up. To get a true cost I would have to factor in resource usage (power, bandwidth, computing resources, etc) and many other hidden costs that are difficult to determine and quantify.

All lines of code, even from the same developer are not even and thus fixing a cost per LoC is inexact to say the least. But without anything better, it’s a decent starting place. So at a minimum try and get your software projects cost to help you plan how much to see it for and when you will break even in that expense, and you might also be able to use it to help market your product as well.

I recently stumbled across a book by Neil Davidson called “Don’t just roll the dice: a usefully short guide to software pricing”. It’s an amazing read and prefect in length, you could pick it up and finish in about 30 minutes, or if you a painfully slow reader like myself, an hour. The book focuses on software pricing and a way of going about it.

I think this is a vital topic to anyone wanting to break into the software market, and eventually trying to sell their software. I’ve seen far to many software products horrible overpriced and think they could sell much more by lowering their price a little.

But this depends on your target audience, if it’s individuals or cash strapped small companies or startups, charging hundreds of dollars for your software might not be the best idea. But if your targeting major enterprises, your fifty dollar product could probably sell for much more.

Neil touches on this pricing demand curve in Chapter 1, and provide a great basis for the rest of the book. Armed with some basic economic and target customer knowledge you can start to develop a cohesive pricing plan for your software. Neil mentions in chapter two that your software is more then just bits and bytes, and a nice GUI. Your product is documentation, support, development roadmap and so much more. In my opinion your product is also your company and the community surrounding your product, company or people.

In one of my Licensing System reviews I found a great licensing application called EZIRIZ IntelliLock. It was priced right, had the right features, but the company wouldn’t respond to my sales emails. If they can’t do that when I dangling money in their face what kind of support will I get when I bought the product and have a problem.

When your developing a product you should look at the marketplace and your competition. Figure out how much they charge and how closely the software maps to your product. But don’t analyze it in a vacuum, take into account the size of the company, it’s community and your perception of the value of the ecosystem around that product. Established products from larger well known companies can change more, even if your product is better you might consider selling it for less until you’ve made a name for yourself and your product.

Customers will compare, especially with the Internet. So if your selling your software more then your closest competitor you have to make sure you justify it to your potential customers with more features, better documentation, a larger community, etc.

As developers we like things round. So Selling software for fifty bucks even is great, none of those messy pennies flying around. But as Neil points out, fives and nines exert another powerful psychological effect on peoples perception of value.

Give Neil Davidson’s book a read and buy a physical copy if you enjoy it. You’ve spent tons of time designing and creating your product, now your only quarter the way there, now you have to market it, sell it and support it. Developing it was the easy part!

It’s a sad day really, one that I’ve been putting off for quite a while with denial, argument and massive amount of excuses. Something this near and dear to my heart took a long time for me to finally come around and make a change and realize when the end is here. So I bid Firefox goodbye, I will remember only the happy days and the fun days when you saved me from IE6 and gave me an amazing web experience.

The amazing web experience with Firefox didn’t go away all at once, no no, it was slowly chipped away with upgrade after upgrade until what I was left with was a slow, lumbering browser with tendencies to crap itself and hog resources. I tried to justify it, I have too many browser windows open, or my addons are causing those issues, not my dear Firefox. But that niggling feeling in the back of my head wouldn’t go away.

It really wasn’t until Chrome was released that I started to see the light. Even IE8 seems better to me now then Firefox, which really is saying something as IE6 so soured me on IE that I would rather program in BASIC my entire life then use any IE. When I first made the switch to Firefox almost no sites would render correctly or even accept Firefox in. Banking sites wouldn’t work with it and other web applications I used were IE only. Moving back and forth between IE6 and Firefox endeared me even more to it.

In multiple runs of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Chrome was fairly faster then Firefox, with Chrome in the 400ms to 500ms range and Firefox in the 800ms to 900ms range. This was the brand new Firefox 3.6 against Chrome 4.0.249.89 on my work desktop and my home desktop. No these weren’t fresh installs of Windows and browsers with no addons, because that’s not where I use browsers or view the web. Firefox has 2 addon’s installed and Chrome had 3.

In addition to just raw JavaScript speed Google Chrome also starts up much faster then Firefox and isn’t prone fits of crashing that Firefox is. At least a couple of times a week I have to kill a hidden Firefox.exe process because Firefox won’t open complaining of another instance running.

But Chrome isn’t the only choice. I’ve tried and liked Opera before, but this was at a time when Firefox was still chugging along well, and a co-worker is really liking the new Opera experience. But really those are the only two other choices left opposed to IE8 and Firefox.

It’s been a good 5 year or so run with Firefox, but I’m not seeing things getting better. Update after update my experience with Firefox gets worse and worse and eventually it will just be the new version of IE6 with less security holes. Not at all a fitting end for the browser that showed the world how great the web can truly be.