Spyware needs to communicate what it is spying. A personal firewall on your machine and some understanding of what your machine should be sending out to others and receiving in can be surprisingly effective in telling you about things happening on your machine. A good one lets you set up default acceptance for your normal stuff and so you see only exceptions.
A better way to treat non commercial customers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Software companies when they move from 'give it away for free just to get users' to 'I must make money now' often take a poor approach to the problem of transition.
Ask yourself who is getting value from using Avantgo - the obvious answer is both consumers and providers of content to varying degrees. But as far as Avantgo is concerned they need to go after the ones that are willing to pay, be it either. It looks likes they have gone after the providers because they probably have invested more in the relationship with Avantgo and are more likely to be willing and able to pay for prices Avantgo will need to charge to make it worth their doing it. Avantgo like many software companies probably does not have the infrastructure to charge micropayments that might make sense to consumers of content.
The problem with going after providers is that they come into several groups some that have money and will pay and some that do not or will not pay because the value Avantgo offers them is simply not worth the money that Avantgo is asking.
One group is the non commercial customers - they don't make money out of whatever service they offer to consumers but they do increase the value of Avantgo to the consumers in general. These are the people that suffer with Avantgo's new model and it looks like the original poster is one of these. Now if Avantgo could identify these people as non commercial users and license them to use Avantgo as long as they stay non commercial then they would keep such users recognising that there is no money in that relationship at the moment and keeping the increased value of having them part of the Avantgo network. A very good example of the implementation of such a model would be Cincom's Non Commercial Smalltalk license.
Another option would have been to migrate all their non paying providers over to a consumer payment service whereby the consumer pays a small monthly amount for unlimited access to the non paying providers and gets paying providers for free. In fact everyone would get the fee paying providers for free. this way Avantgo would have gained a consumer service they could charge for and a free consumer service for the providers that it make sense to do that.
But I am sure that they thought long and hard about the right way to change their charging model - it is absolutely critical for any business and getting it wrong can have catastrophic effects on a business. They seem to have opted for a simple to implement and straight forward model that is likely to generate more money in the short term (from the providers who do feel the need to pay the $1000 to continue this service) rather than one that will build their network over time and add value to the network. They are clearly willing to risk losing many valuable providers (who add value in terms of the breadth of their 'channels') because they do not bring money to Avantgo's bottom line. I suspect they implemented this change too late in their business and when the need for money was to strong. But it may just be that they did not realise they had other alternatives and if so maybe they will react to this/. discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Spyware needs to communicate what it is spying. A personal firewall on your machine and some understanding of what your machine should be sending out to others and receiving in can be surprisingly effective in telling you about things happening on your machine. A good one lets you set up default acceptance for your normal stuff and so you see only exceptions.
forgot to put this as a working link: Cincom Smalltalk's Non Commercial download programme
Software companies when they move from 'give it away for free just to get users' to 'I must make money now' often take a poor approach to the problem of transition.
Ask yourself who is getting value from using Avantgo - the obvious answer is both consumers and providers of content to varying degrees. But as far as Avantgo is concerned they need to go after the ones that are willing to pay, be it either. It looks likes they have gone after the providers because they probably have invested more in the relationship with Avantgo and are more likely to be willing and able to pay for prices Avantgo will need to charge to make it worth their doing it. Avantgo like many software companies probably does not have the infrastructure to charge micropayments that might make sense to consumers of content.
The problem with going after providers is that they come into several groups some that have money and will pay and some that do not or will not pay because the value Avantgo offers them is simply not worth the money that Avantgo is asking.
One group is the non commercial customers - they don't make money out of whatever service they offer to consumers but they do increase the value of Avantgo to the consumers in general. These are the people that suffer with Avantgo's new model and it looks like the original poster is one of these. Now if Avantgo could identify these people as non commercial users and license them to use Avantgo as long as they stay non commercial then they would keep such users recognising that there is no money in that relationship at the moment and keeping the increased value of having them part of the Avantgo network. A very good example of the implementation of such a model would be Cincom's Non Commercial Smalltalk license.
Another option would have been to migrate all their non paying providers over to a consumer payment service whereby the consumer pays a small monthly amount for unlimited access to the non paying providers and gets paying providers for free. In fact everyone would get the fee paying providers for free. this way Avantgo would have gained a consumer service they could charge for and a free consumer service for the providers that it make sense to do that.
But I am sure that they thought long and hard about the right way to change their charging model - it is absolutely critical for any business and getting it wrong can have catastrophic effects on a business. They seem to have opted for a simple to implement and straight forward model that is likely to generate more money in the short term (from the providers who do feel the need to pay the $1000 to continue this service) rather than one that will build their network over time and add value to the network. They are clearly willing to risk losing many valuable providers (who add value in terms of the breadth of their 'channels') because they do not bring money to Avantgo's bottom line. I suspect they implemented this change too late in their business and when the need for money was to strong. But it may just be that they did not realise they had other alternatives and if so maybe they will react to this /. discussion.