Re: Fwd: OSS XWT Apps

> Are you interested?
>
> - Justin.

Yes.  Very interested.

First things first, you need a business model.  A business model relies on
3 things:

1) A user base
2) A useful product
3) Good internal structure

Here's my thoughts on acheiving the above 3.

1) To acquire a user base is difficult.  You'll struggle to get people to
pay for a product unless it is significantly better than the competition
in all areas or unless they come to like or rely on the niche strengths of
that product.

So, you have a minimum of 2 levels of product; one of which is free and
the other(s) which you pay for.

Free products attract ridiculous amounts of users when they are useful. 
Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, ICQ and other IM services are a testament to this. 
So me are not even particularly good.  Remember, usefulness does not
equate to being good.

So, you give away a basic service for free and you put reasonable
restrictions on that service to encourage people to use it.  Then you
acquire a sufficient user base to which you can sell your product for a
profit.

We have no hope of creating a product to all-round feature-wise compete
with what already exists.

2) A useful product

Remembering that usefulness does not equate to good, first target useful
features that currently attract users then build upon them to make them
better than the competition.

For example, we should not target explicit IMAP mailbox giveaways because
the target user does not care for it.  Hotmail does not sell premium
accounts by giving IMAP access.

Useful services:
* Mail
* Contacts
* Scheduling
* Task Management
* Web Editing (home page building)
* Online Office (edit anywhere)

You can give away basic mail (amount of mail), basic contacts (limited
number), basic scheduling (limited events per week), limited task
management (limited number of pending tasks), and overall storage
(combined account size of mail, web space and documents) with little
resources per user.  Then each level of extra service should make your
account more flexible.  It should be a level of at least 1 paying customer
accounting for the cost to serve 100 or 1000 non-paying customers.

Things you should not look to limit are vital integration of services. 
Integration of services is what will bring reliance of services.  Nor
should the initial limitations be too off-putting.  If they are,
non-paying users will not stay with the service long enough to become
reliant on it.

It frustrates me incredibly that in Hotmail I cannot simply search for a
friend who also uses Hotmail and by virtue access (with his/her
permission) and see their personal information (birthday, home addrses
etc).  Maybe you can, but it's not obvious enough when I go into the
'contacts' service.

I can, and have done, swap Hotmail for any other free webmail service. 
The extra storage space in my mailbox was not enough incentive for me to
pay for what is a rather poor service.  If Microsoft worked on Hotmail
properly, it could make them a lot of money as they have the biggest
target audience in the world for this type of service.

The useful services mentioned above are more than anybody else offers,
currently.  Task management would be a massive bonus; I'd sign up for
anything that offers free task management.  And if it was good, I'd pay
for it.  You forget things otherwise and something that helps you organise
your life and improves your personal productivity is something that is
valuable.

Other potential services:
* Mail lists
    These are invaluable when you know about them.
    How I'd love to have all my former university
    classmates on a mail list that I could contact
    at the push of a button without the hassle of
    manually managing a group of ever changing
    email addresses
* Multiple domains
    Good domains are hard to come by.  We can't hope
    to touch a good brandname like 'Hotmail'.

3) Good business structure is important to keep everybody motivated. 
Simple royalties is not good business structure.

If a venture like this was to proceed, you'd want an organised company
with joint ownership for the founders and decent consideration of the
plethora of other factors that go into sensible company and finance
management.  Fortunately, I work with people who manage and finance
businesses.  Should this happen (it's definitely plausible) then at least
We could have good advice.  (I have copied them into this email for their
casual reading.)

Although a good thing to remember is that nobody wants nothing.  Everybody
wants something.  Good advice is rarely free.

As for licensing, this is relatively unimportant from the XWT perspective.
 All the hard work will be server side.  Some neat stuff would obviously
be XWT side, so a commercial license might be preferrable, but the server
side will be the more difficult to get right.  XWT does most of the client
work for you, and as such gives you a head start at such a project. :) 
Judging from your enthusiasm, this is obviously evident to you.

If it did happen, the people I'd recommend from a technical POV to involve
are:

David Cranshaw ([email protected]) who is a clever and effective coder.  His
text widget is amazing and he'd be the best person to design and implement
a rich text editor and html renderer in XWT.

Adam Megacz ([email protected]) who owns XWT and hence you'd want on board for
ensuring effective management of XWT as well as getting important fixes
distrubted.

Emiliano Haynes ([email protected]) who is well motivated and persistent.

Richard Clarke (ric-6HPBYRMZMLFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]) who is an amazing perler.  And I cannot
overstate 'amazing'.  He is also adaptable, as well as being able to work
insane amounts.

As for a brand name, I'd start off by procuring xwt.com as a domain.  XWT
Services, XWT Office, XWT whatever.  A short, easy to remember .com is a
valuable commodity.

- Charlie

PS.  I've heard you're a very good graphical designer; is there anywhere I
can look?  I like eye candy. :)  Perhaps you can look at my XWT icon ideas
and develop further or provide alternatives.