Switching from email and Bugzilla to Tender

20th March 2010 23:09:13 by Richard Bennett

The release of MacCallGrind 2.0 last month marked a return for us to developing commercial software products after a break of about 15 years, and in that time a lot has changed in what is now called the micro ISV market.

Back in the 80s and 90s, the only way to sell a software product was through a publisher, who would have the distributor and retailer connections, and would take 60-80% of the revenue, much like the record companies have until recently. Don't get me wrong, I've worked with some really good and really nice publishers over the years, who certainly earned their cut. But these days small developers like ourselves can now take control of the entire development, marketing and sales cycle, which means we can put much of the revenue back into development, instead of the pockets of the man.

The great thing about publishers though, was that they filtered all the support requests, and only sent on the ones they'd been able to reproduce and verify, meaning it was usually a snap to find the bug, fix it, and send back an update or patch. But now, we have to do all that ourselves. And so we're taking the jump into Tender, a fairly new web based support tool.

We're still finding our feet, so please bear with us, and if there is anything critical that you need support/help for and you're not getting a fast enough reply, then please continue to use our phone number if necessary.