Re: Website CMS questions

Austin, Darrel wrote:
> This statement can be easily spun in the opposite direction:
> 
> There's no incentive for commercial CMS vendors to make their products
> easy to use so that the customers can be independent and self-reliant as
> that takes away from their lucrative annual 'maintenance and support'
> contracts.

Not at all. All customers will want "maintenance" in order to get bug 
fixes and new features even if the product is easy to use. Those things 
are unrelated. As for support, again, we prefer to spend our time doing 
development instead of support, so making it work and easy to use is in 
our best interest. We have a fixed support fee, so the less they call, 
the better. How do you get people to call us less? By having the product 
be easy to use, bug-free, and by having good documentation.

So the incentive to make the product easy to use and require as little 
support as is possible is built-in. Can you say the same thing for a 
model based on OpenSource (i.e. no licensing costs)? I would be most 
interested in hearing about it! (really!)

> In the end, make a good product. That's all that matters. 

But that statement ignores the underlying problem: does the model 
promote making a "good product".

If I was the manager of a company that provides support for an 
OpenSource solution, and I wanted to maximize my profits, why oh why 
would I make a "good product", in the sense of making it easy to use so 
that customers does not have to use our services? If services is where I 
get the money, that seems backwards.

Now, if I as a manager has a conscience (which is not a given these 
days), I might be inclined to do what is good for the customers anyway, 
and make it easy to use. But, that WOULD impact the bottom line of the 
company, as there would be less income from services. If customers were 
able to do everything on their own, where is the income? Explain that to me.

>> 80%+ of our customers do zero customization of our CMS 
>> product to create their websites. It's all point and click. 
> 
> You might be absolutely right...I haven't used your product. That said,
> every time I see the 'point and click' statement in software sales
> literature I become a bit suspect. More often than not, it's anything
> but 'point and click'. Or, it may be point and click, but
> technically/more accurately it's: point and click and point and click
> and point and click and point and click and point and click and point
> and click and test. Oh, you want it to work THAT way? Well,
> simple...just tap into our API and write your own module. ;o)

See, that's where the above reasoning kicks in: since the best thing for 
us would be if none of our customers EVER calls us, we actually work 
VERY hard to ensure that every click counts, and that the number of 
clicks necessary to accomplish a particular task is minimized. That 
minimizes the amount of support we have to do, which, in the end, 
benefits our company directly.

Isn't it amazing what a good model can do to encourage beneficial 
behaviour...

> That's fair. Again, I've just been speaking from my own perspective and
> from that of other's I've dealt with.

Which is natural. The problem is that you generalized it to cover more 
than was possible, and which made it false. Which is, again, natural. 
Most people do this at times. It's still wrong though.

> Well, hold on...I never meant to imply it's 'cheap'. No matter the
> product, it costs money to maintain, train, customize and deploy. No
> argument there. With a CMS, my guess is that one's expense is going to
> be moreso with internal staff getting them able to maintain content than
> with any specific technology (depending on the org, of course).

Indeed... and yet your initial comment was:
 > The only difference between OS and Commercial CMS products is that you
 > pay more for one up front. ;o)

Which, considering what you said above, is hence completely irrelevant.

And if maintaining content is going to be the main expense, would you 
prefer one that is easy-to-use or not? If you want one that is 
easy-to-use, then by my arguments you are more likely to find it in the 
commercial than in the OpenSource world, simply because there's a 
natural incentive in the commercial world to make it so (at least if the 
business model is similar what I've described; you can probably make it 
both licensing-driven *and* support-driven if you want to!), whereas in 
the OpenSource world it seems that making it easy-to-use would 
effectively be to shoot yourself in the foot.

If I am wrong here, and there are OpenSource business models that get 
around this, I'd love to hear about it!

> I don't think it's ever fair to say OS is cheaper than Commercial or
> vice versa by default. There are so many 'it depends' involved.

Yup, as always. My curiosity right now is whether there's some inherent 
traits in the commercial model which makes the total cost of ownership 
lower than that of an OpenSource model.

> My recommendation is based solely on the 'try it out' phase. You can try
> OS software without too much long-term commitment. A lot of commercial
> software has that overhead of the initial licensing cost. I've seen a
> lot of 'enterprise software' in use not because it's good, but because
> 'well, we paid for it'.

Sure.

> I got a few replies stating that not everyone has the money/time for the
> 'try it out' phase. I find that absurd. When shopping for software, it's
> really hard to come up with a proper list of needs until one actually
> gets to experience the product. No amount of planning can replace some
> hands on interaction with the product.

ABsolutely. Which is why most people who try our stuff, that "point 'n 
clickety" thing, get it without bothering with endless configuration 
files and script modifications that so many others offer as the user 
experience. YMMV though.

> I'd never buy a vehicle without taking it for a test drive, yet I see
> companies purchasing software all the time and then dumping it in the
> hands of IT and end-users. 

Yeah, that's stupid.

> Now, if any of you are a commercial CMS company that makes a quality
> product, sells it at a fair price, offers plenty of support and
> peer-to-peer channels for said support, then feel free to ignore all of
> my ranting. ;o)

Don't worry, I am ;-)

best,
   Rickard