Financial analysis
I decided to spend some time with Excel trying to do a look back at how things are doing. I am not going to give you numbers, but the trends in the data are interesting. All the data is relevant to this year only.
Tell me that the top one doesn’t remind you of a rude gesture. As you can see, NHibernate rules the roost here, on the bottom, it is even clearer. I think that a lot of that is that I am closely related to NHibernate that is making the difference.
Looking at the data over time gives me a very interesting perspective about the introduction of subscriptions. That was expected, but I don’t think that I really grokked that. Looking at the bottom image, I can tell you that subscriptions are pretty big, from the point of view of license numbers, but they are much weaker from the point of view of money in the bank.I knew that, I even wanted that, since the whole point of subscriptions was to get sustainable revenue stream rather than money today. But I wasn’t really ready for that.
This one is particularly annoying, because there is a dry spot around the 20th every single month, and I get abandonment anxiety at that time.
That is it for now :-)
Comments
Interesting. It's hard to say what sort of affect subscriptions have had if they were release with licenses. Since many people who got a license may have purchased a subscription had they been avaliable.
Question is, is this enough? Are you going to be able to afford to keep making products?
With software tools it's not about the first few months, it's about the long term. The worst scenario you can have is when you release, a lot of people buy it (say, to a point that you make a good year salary) and then it ends.
To get a good long term progress, you need to create a good community around the application so people start spreading using worth to mouth, blogs etc. the name of your application and you can sell newer versions / subscriptions to these community members year over year (to a point that they are not upgrading anymore because there's no point ;))
It's hard to get to that, there's a lot of competition and on the internet the group with the focus on the 'newest and greatest' gets the most attention. Also, I sense a growing aversion against subscriptions, as they always seem to expire when you need them and overall increase costs for customers. For ISVs, subscriptions however could be a way to generate more money out of a small customer base. I'm not convinced it's required to get a good solid group of customers, but then again, I also hate subscriptions.
What surprises me is the lack of any real uptake on the profilers besides NHProf. As if people on other o/r mappers are not interested in a profiler. As I don't think the group of EF users is small (but I have no hard numbers, just the # of articles on the web is very big, so the # of users must be OK), it's perhaps a matter of exposure.
Justin,
I have been doing this close to two years now :-)
Frans,
A lot depends on the style that you develop. For myself, I like to push things out ASAP, which actually work against a vNext development :-)
Subscriptions work better as a steady stream of revenue, but you need a LOT of them.
Subscriptions the way I did them are continuous unless you cancel them, and there are safety features so even if your subscription run out, you can still use it for a few days more, etc.
That mitigate that, I think.
And I agree about the uptake of the other profilers.
I think that it is more that for many people, I am one of the main sources for NHibernate, as such, I am in a good position to be selling NH tools.
Yeah, I'm a bit surprised at the numbers for the other profilers but I think that may also have to do with the general stigma against .Net developers. You've got the developers that evaluate anything they can get their hands on and are always looking for new stuff that can make their lives easier. This is the NH crowd and the people that purchased the other profilers.
Then there is the stereotypical .Net developer who use whatever Microsoft puts in front of their faces. (In their defence it's often stipulated to be that way by managers.) Thus, if it isn't provided with their MSDN subscription and integrated into Visual Studio, it isn't adopted.
EFProf is definitely suffering from lack of awareness. I recently presented on ORMs to one of our clients, and showed EFProf to a room of programmers using EF. None of them had even heard of it - but by the time I was done it was clear that they needed it going forward...
I'll remember to wait till the 20th to make payments in the future. :)
Thanks for posting these charts. Good data for others to use for projections and comparisons.