ADM -- Just What Is Going On?

Posted by dan7000
Mar 5, 2007 at 03:59 PM

As a supporter and continuous user of ADM I thought I’d chime in.
I’m definitely not defending ADM’s behavior, but I don’t feel as sour about it as some seem to.

This is just my perspective, but first, I did pay for the beta, and I feel like I got a pretty good value for my money, even if I never get another version. I have entered tens of thousands of topics into around a hundred huge outlines in the past 3 years that I’ve used ADM. I still use it actively for approximately 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. I don’t remember the last time it crashed or hanged. Compare this to MS Word. I paid more for MS Word than I did for ADM, and I use Word far less. Word crashes or hangs very regularly, and it’s slow as a dog.

Second, we have to realize that almost ALL of the software we talk about here is developed primarily by one person—and most of them do it part time. WhizFolders? Jot Notes? InfoHandler? I’ve managed Windows software businesses at big and small companies, and it’s easy to tell from the scope and pace of these development efforts what’s going on. Face it: it costs $180,000 / year to employ a programmer (including equipment, health care, etc). In addition to the programmer, you hopefully have a QA person, a marketing person and tech support (possibly these are the same person).
I’d be surprised if any of these companies has sold more than 20,000 copies in the past 4 years of their work. Most of them cost around $50 or less. That’s $1 mil over 4 years: $250,000 /yr. It’s very doubtful that any VC’s have given money for these efforts, so this is their entire budget if they are a huge succes. (I leave out web clipping programs, who may have been able to get funding).

All that is to just say: nobody should be surprised to learn that ADM had only one programmer. Also, nobody should be surprised if, after years of doing this as a side job without getting close to the obvious goal of getting rich or going public or whatever, the 2-man company gets disgusted and gives up or drops out for a while. This is inherent with these small-time software efforts.

I said that I wasn’t hoping to defend Eric or Arne, but I will say that I object to them being compared to snake oils salesmen. I know people like this and I’ve worked with them. They have a dream, and their dream has sucked years of hard work out of them and it’s not working out.
We, the users, have reaped the benefits of that hard work. Sure, we paid for it, but I think we got the good end of the deal.

-dan