The Pain of Software Economics

I hear you, buddy. I'm in the same boat with a few pieces of software I've written. My latest is "ClassicModem", a bridge which allows applications running in Mac OS X's Classic environment to access the serial port/built-in modem. For everything that Classic gets right, I was surprised as anyone I couldn't use my credit card authorization software under Classic at all, since it needs to talk to the modem directly.

So I put in something like three weeks of time getting it working. Turned out to be a real pain, since the two obvious ways of making it work (Open Transport and/or Apple Events) both have subtle deal-breakers.

So now I have the software working for myself, but you'll probably never see it. I've been shopping it around, trying to ensure there's enough folks who would actually buy the software. Turns out there isn't. Not even close. I'd need around 250 folks to purchase the software to break even. I have eight.

And this isn't the first app I've written that's in this circumstance. I'm hoping that in a few months I'll have a system in place that can result in a win-win for these types of programs — I'll keep this journal updated if/when I get there.

Tuesday, February 04, 2003
08:54 PM