Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, January 10, 2008:
More Coverage of NewsGator
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
A few interesting articles:
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/Article/NNWFree-2008-01-09-19-00 (thanks to Mike for the link).
http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/2008/01/scorched-earth.html (nice post from a competitor RSS reader)
How long until Brent and Nick move on you think? It makes no business sense to keep 2 of the premier developers out there working on free products. The products will do great (for a while) without them being free.
Anyone out there who creates software for a living should be pretty unnerved by this. Your livelihood just took another little hit.
Is there any chance they made them free because they weren’t doing well financially? I suppose it’s possible that sales were not up to snuff, though it seems unlikely.
Discussion
"Is there any chance they made them free because they weren’t doing well financially?"
I thought that myself because everyone I know uses Google Reader. I've read stuff that says Google Reader has the most market share, and it's free.
I love my NetNewsWire + Newsgator Online combination, and I like the fact that they are now free. I'm getting a BlackBerry in the next week so I'll be using Newsgator Go.
My wild guess is that in order to grow their business at the rate they want to they think they can make more money on the usage data and free advertising of the Newsgator brand for their enterprise stuff (like Nick said). With Google Reader out there, the chances of someone paying for their products is shrinking.
It can't be that expensive for them to develop those consumer products. Nick did the Windows one all by himself. The web one is nice, but it's literally just reading some XML, displaying it, and letting you mark the fact that you've read something. Their whole dev team for the consumer products could be 5 people. (Which is cheap compared to what it takes to create the new version of Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop.)
There will always be a mixture of free software and pay-for software. I've never used a email client, web browser, or chat program that I had to pay for.
Created by Michael Sica on 01.10.2008 12:54 pm
Some software does become a commodity. It's expected to be part of the OS. I think we're probably pretty far from that in RSS readers though (or should be). The number of people using email, chat and a browser is many many millions of times larger than RSS readers which 95% of average people have never heard of.
Created by Ian on 01.10.2008 1:03 pm
Dude, what happened? I used to think you were a level-headed guy. I was considering buying help spot, but now that I see you attacking people for little reason I'm wondering what other kinds of suprises may be waiting to pop out...don't think I'll gamble my money on your product to find out - take a chill pill dude. I can't imagine what you must be reading to be so freaked out about this.
Created by na on 01.10.2008 1:17 pm
To me, just because something is (relatively) a niche, doesn't mean it should free or not free. I don't think NewsGator is the 'bad guy' here. Thunderbird has a free news reader, so does Firefox, Safari, IE, etc... (I've already mentioned Google Reader.)
I just can't get upset about companies having to respond to their competitors. If a business can't create enough value in the News Reader segment or augment their business model to deal with free competitors, they need to attack a different market or solve a different problem.
UserScape certainly does! (You've got free and open source competitors! You've even talked about them on this blog and setup a product-neutral web site about them! - is that still around?)
There might be some truly awesome stuff News Readers could do that will create a profit for a business, but the core problem they are solving is not a very deep thing to solve. Store your feeds, fetch 'em, display 'em, mark them as read.
I didn't put any money behind promoting Pudding's first launch, because as someone pointed out to me (Chris at Gliffy), I wasn't different ENOUGH from email. Pudding is certainly more effective than email, but is it $6 - $150/month more effective??? And that's why I'm stepping up my offering this year, and taking the product in a slightly new direction.
It's just business man... 
Created by Michael Sica on 01.10.2008 1:23 pm
NA, I wasn't freaked out initially. After their rude comments to me though it got my feathers ruffled a bit. They must have suspected that some paying customers would be upset by this, I don't think countering that with rude behavior is the best customer service tactic. The links above are just additional commentary that seems relevant to me.
Created by Ian on 01.10.2008 1:26 pm
I never said they were bad. If they can't make it in business selling them then that's fine (though it runs counter to your previous argument that a small dev team could build all of this). I think fronting data collection as a feature is a bit off, no? I think being rude on customers blogs is off no?
Created by Ian on 01.10.2008 1:31 pm
Bad vs. "awfully sleazy" - what's the difference? 
My point about a small dev team is that they can make money on their other services, and still afford to continue developing their consumer products without charging for them ... because they're (i'm assuming here) not insanely expensive to create.
Fronting data collection? - Most e-commerce sites are doing all kinds of tracking so they can build a more effective site that can sell more stuff to me. NewsGator said they are keeping the data anon, and I don't have a reason to think they are lying. You're not going anywhere on the (larger commercial) Internet without it being tracked. The golden key to advertising is showing you extremely targeted ads based on what you like.
It would be different if this were a plot by insurance companies to find out that Ian Landsman is researching a disease and then drop him from their plan because he may be in ill health.
Your concerns about privacy are legitimate, but I haven't read anything that would make me believe NewsGator is doing anything out of line with other major outlets (Yahoo, Google, Amazon, MSN, etc....)
Being rude - I totally feel you on this one, but..... you are blogging on your company's web site and you did call another business entity "sleazy". Just lighten up a little! It was kind of a funny one-liner. "You can keep sending us a check."
Created by Michael Sica on 01.10.2008 2:51 pm
I guess. Not sure how throwing one liners at your customers is ever a good idea when they're upset, but if that's what you consider good business...
I think the point people are missing is that A) this isn't a huge deal it's just bloggers and blog commenters getting worked up as usual. B) Old time NNW users remember when it was just Brent trying to start this little company. So there's a certain warm and fuzzy feeling that you have about that and now it's gone. I guess that's as much as what it's about as anything else.
Also, if I sent out an email to all HS customers and told them it's now free (too bad if you paid for it more than a mont ago) and that I'm opting you into collecting info on your installations they wouldn't be happy. My guess is they'd be calling me worse things than iffy, sleazy or icky. Before you say it's not the same, it is to me as lots of private data passes through my RSS reader as I have lots of back office RSS secured feeds.
Created by Ian on 01.10.2008 3:06 pm
Ok, we'll just agree to see these things a little different on this topic. (You can turn off the data collecting in NNW, but I don't think you can on their web site version.)
BTW, Brent responded to that Les' guy's questions regarding the private feeds. They're taking them out of the data captures. (I use it for that too.)
Created by Michael Sica on 01.10.2008 3:21 pm
Hi Ian, I disagree with your point that anybody writing software for a living should be unnerved by this. It seems pretty obvious that the RSS reader is becoming a commodity with the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc. offering free or OS integrated applications. I'd be nervous if I was writing these applications, and I would assume that Newsgator has realized they need to find some other ways to monetize their business and trying to sell the desktop software was not the best approach. It seems like giving your popular reader away while building a large repository of attention data is their intent. I do agree that it's a little creepy... just because they don't intend to abuse this data, the fact that it is collected at all raises issues about abuse, security, etc.
Created by Kris on 01.12.2008 2:15 pm