Last Chance to Join the DotComIt Focus Group
Just a self indulgent reminder that the DotComIt Focus Group survey closes today. You can enter here. We'll be contacting participants for follow up early next week.
To refresh, DotComIt is working on a line of commercial Flex Components, and we are having the focus groups conducted to get feedback. This will be your chance to have a say. And we'll pay you for the opportunity to pick your brain.
These focus groups will be conducted by a third party, so if you know me you don't have to worry about a conflict of interests or "peeving me off".
A few folks over the the Flex Coders list have asked for "Free components" in place of a cash prize. We're definitely willing to work with interested parties on that.
I don't want to participate in the focus group, but I'll be glad to offer you this brief feedback: IMO, it's very hard to sell development tools to developers, unless you're Microsoft. Look at all of the amazingly good stuff that's out there for free; Eclipse, Netbeans, Oracle SQL Developer, JBoss, even the Flex framework itself. I think the reason is that for every really useful commercial tool or component, there's going to be a free and/or OSS alternative that's at least comparable. And if you create something that happens to catch fire commercially, there's a good chance someone will produce a OSS version. It's like selling shoes to shoemakers.
The exceptions, I think, are those products that are a.) difficult and costly to develop, and b.) serve only a niche market. The Adobe Flex Charting components would be an example of this. If something is costly and difficult to develop, but there's a wide demand for it, it will probably be produced by the OSS community eventually.