I was born by the river…

When we started The Blue Technologies Group back in 2003 (yup), we were pretty naive. We looked at what other companies were doing, at the state of the Mac software market. The downfall of classic Shareware, the rise of official “beta”-releases, the trend of constant updates through .dmg-downloads or of half-baked full version cycles.

Lots of low-priced products that you ended up buying but not using, lots of feature add-ons that completely changed the UI and even some core functionality — to us, it all looked pretty messed up for the end-user, and we wanted to take an alternate route.

So we set out to do it all in the “right” way. Old-school, conservative, so to say.

Full-scale internal beta-testing. Don’t release until it’s ready. Don’t update unless it’s essential. Don’t go for a mass of price-happy users, but instead go for those who really want your product.

Concentrate support on your users, and not on those who want a totally different application. Make it a worthwhile purchase by releasing free updates, even years after the original shipped. Don’t fall for he who screams “feature request” the loudest, but instead double-check every feature addition every time for compliance with the app’s goals and intentions.

Yeah, we know.

But looking back, pretty much every decision we made came from an end-user perspective. We did what we wished others were doing.

And looking back, we made some of the worst decisions a startup company could possibly make. We were essentially fighting a set market structure. People were so used to how the system worked, that our offer was just alienating them left and right. From day one, we were attacked for what we did and how we did it.

How many times did we hear that we were pricing Ulysses “for sheer greed”. Of course, the same folks were giving us helpful advice on how to “effectively sell more copies”. Now picture that.

So, the vast majority of potential users didn’t like our approach.

The vast majority of press outlets didn’t like our approach either. It was all good and dandy for the first two years, but after that… try getting a news splash on a point update when everybody else is releasing full version jumps.

We didn’t even get large coverage in germany, even though it’s our home, and (e.g.) Ulysses is the only writing environment in its class to offer fully-fledged localization. It’s a shame, really…

Of course, we also made a lot of mistakes here. I try to forget, but I remember being on an internet-tv show where I should demo Ulysses to a large crowd and totally blew it. I could make excuses here, but who gives a damn, anyway. This ended up being so embarrassing, that I swore to never do anything like that again. Ever.

I also think that we over-estimated our possible output by under-estimating the signal-to-noise ratio that’s imminent in the way we’re working here. You may not know this, but we’re doing this all over the internet, pretty much in our spare-time (for the most part), with each member of the group living at least 250 kilometers away from another.

Given the situation, it’s a small wonder we’re still working together. I got two kids now. Max has left home and moved to a new city. Mac OS X went from 10.2 to 10.6 — it sure has been a looooooooooooooong time.

And economically? It’s not a total disaster, but it comes close.

We haven’t seen a penny for an update from our installed user-base during all this time. Full Screen editing, Markers, Semantic Styles, Groups, Filters, Collections, that crazy advanced Search & Replace function, Multi-Notes, Project Notes, the Text Trash; we added all that stuff for free, and some of it has been truly revolutionary. For Ulysses, of course, but also for the greater scope, the Mac market, the “creative writing” market.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll be releasing Ulysses 1.7 at no cost. It will be the 10th or so update. It will feature a brand-new look, some pretty impressive feature additions and lots of user-requested improvements.

We could, once again, release this with a new full version number tacked on, like 3.0, maybe even 4.0 or 5.0, charge a small update fee, and it’d be completely legit. But we won’t. Call us stubborn, but we’ll stick to this.

So, you ask, which change is gonna come?

Well, today I’m officially announcing the beginning of the end of The Blue Technologies Group.

Over the past couple of months, we quietly established a new company. We got a new website up and running to which we were (and still are) slowly adding content and features. We had to do it that way so it could really sink in, with us at least.

We’ll openly begin phasing out blue-tec come Ulysses 1.7, and then transfer everything we got to that new company.

It will not be a mere name change, but rather a complete shift in corporate philosophy. For starters, we’ll be far more transparent with pretty much everything than we ever were with blue-tec, be it on a personal or development level. The new site will be slimmed-down, with focus shifting away from large product descriptions to essential information and user feedback/communication.

We’ll also be making radical changes to our portfolio, with the Localization Suite out- and likely being open sourced. With a new version of Stapler coming later this year, that will (hopefully) blow everybody’s mind. With research & development continuing on what we believe to be a revolutionary music playing application. With a bunch of iPhone apps in the pipeline, ranging from games to utilities, not least an experiment called “Ulysses mobile”, which may show that you can, indeed, write longer texts or be otherwise productive on Apple’s tiniest machine to date.

We’ll also try to avoid most if not all of the mistakes we made in the past. That’s not going to say that we’ll go on a .x-update frenzy or begin charging for every bug-fix release. But 1.7 will most probably be the last time you see a 1.x Ulysses, and we won’t go for classic shareware with Stapler 2.0. Things will be different from now on.

Of course, we’ll also have a new forum open, and we will run a new blog. As a matter of fact, the new blog has already been started. So without further ado — here we go.

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce to you: The Soulmen.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 9:08 am and is filed under Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.