ADM -- Just What Is Going On?

Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 5, 2007 at 04:28 PM

Hi Dan,

If you’re happy with the program and use it, that’s great; and if you’re happy with what it does for you, that’s great too. (I stopped using ADM when it started losing my data). I’m also not going to bad mouth Eric or Arne personally. What I will say, though, is that I’m one of those one-man software houses, so I know what it’s like. I don’t object when people stop developing for whatever reasons. What I do object to is the fact that they may no effort to communcate this to their existing or new users.

There is nothing on the website to suggest that the program is no longer being sold (if you sell it, you have to support it, at least to the extent of sending out a working unlock code!). There have been no e-mails to users letting us know of the hiatus. For me, that’s just not acceptable. Being British, I don’t have an affinity for sellers of snake oil, but we have other words for such people ......

I promise an update to my software every quarter, and that’s been the case every quarter for the past 6 years. If there comes a time when I stop doing that, I will put that information on my website and tell the users. It’s the least one can do.

Graham

dan7000 wrote:
>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
> >