TurtolCMS v0.6 is out. I released the next version of my favorite pet, the TurtolCMS a couple days ago. Ok, let's be fair: WE, Roberto and I, released it. He did at least as much work as I did. So credit where credit is due. This is pretty much just a maintenance release and a version bump. I've changed the copyright to reflect the fact that I own the software now, not Turtol. We completed and added a bunch of the features that have been waiting in the wings since Turtol's demise in January. And Roberto and I mapped out where we want to take the software.
When Turtol was around, we had a guy (Will) whose job was pretty much to work on the CMS. He did other stuff, but since we based our operations around the thing, it made sense to have a guy devoted to fixing the bugs and advancing the features. As we took on projects, we'd look to see where their specific feature requests would overlap with our "general" feature wish-list, and we'd get Roberto and Will to hack it together. It was, in my opinion, a pretty good way to run things. If we had enough advance notice of an upcoming feature, the guys could spend the extra time to build a general purpose tool rather than a specific one, and then we could resell the crap out of it to other customers (or, very often, to concurrent customers). If we didn't have that kind of time, we'd do the general design, Roberto would crank out a very specific solution for our customer (at an appropriately higher price, naturally) and some while later Will and Roberto would generalize what had gone before, and THEN we'd resell the crap out of it.
There's no doubt that software publishing has the greatest potential ROI of any industry, precisely because you can resell the crap out of it.
When you manufacture gizmods or offer plumbing services or whatever, you have a certain production/service cost and a certain production/service capacity. If you want to make more money, you have only a few options:
- lower costs (but watch out for quality issues)
- rise prices (but beware of lower-priced competition)
- increase capacity (but building that new plant/hiring that assistant costs a lot up-front and is a big gamble)
Now, the software biz is, to be sure, subject to some of these same issues. But unlike manufacturing, where there is always the cost of raw materials, and service industries, where there are only so many billable hours in a week, once the investment in a software package is paid off, it's pretty much a license to print money. Now, I know that there are those whole "upgrade" and "support" issues. But still, Microsoft wouldn't be the behemoth it is if the margins weren't so good. The problem with this, of course, is you have to build something that solves, and I mean really solves, some problem that everybody has. (Or, you could be Microsoft and just sorta solve problems we don't really have but that they've convinced us we do. Actually, for that, pharmaceuticals is probably the place to be.)
One of the mantra in the Open Source world is "scratch your own itch," which refers to the fact that FOSS software is built by the very folks who need to solve the problem it solves. This often leads to software which scratches ONLY ONE itch. Making it scratch someone else's similar itch isn't always easy. Good software adapts to different itches easily. Great software does so with no fuss whatsoever. Custom-built point solutions can be profitable, but exact a cost in programmer time and ongoing support. General purpose software can be sold and resold and resold again. If it's good software, you'll have to make updates and upgrades and fixes and the like, but every time you do, ideally, you'll solve a larger subset of the problems in your domain and thus be able to gain market share. If it's great software, you won't have to update it very often (lowering costs) and at the same time it will appeal to a lot of customers (increasing capacity) and you can charge a premium for it (raising prices). Score.
Great software is rare, of course. But since we were scratching several similar itches all at the same time, I think the TurtolCMS is on the road to Great. Not there yet, mind, but on the path. Of course, that path is more serpentine and narrow that it once was, because I don't have 40 hours a week dedicated to advancing the project. Still, we're getting there.
