gary’s web sofa

I bought Macromedia Homesite 5.5 from Macromedia’s web store back in 2005, just after Adobe bought Macromedia. They’ve long since killed off Homesite but it’s never been beaten in my opinion as a HTML/web code editor. I had a need yesterday to make a minor change to a PHP file and I decided to dust off Homesite rather than edit in notepad. I went to my CD wallet and couldn’t find the CD so I thought I was pretty much stuffed. Most of my on-line purchases have been from Digital River and I expected similar treatment (at best) from Adobe. DR expects you to pay a premium to download your software again later. Here’s a sample from Symentec’s online store provided by DR. It’s a total piss take, but what can you do?

I dug out my old order confirmation email and clicked on the link to Macromedia’s web store. I got redirected to the Adobe store login, where my old Macromedia login worked, and could go straight to my order history and not only re-download my purchase 4 years later, I could also view my license key! If only all online stored operated this way I’d shop online for software more often.

Just days after Amazon announce international availability of their nice but ugly Kindle, B&N upstage them with the "leak" of their Nook device. It has all the features of the Kindle wrapped up in a far sexier shell for $259. Hmmm. Now all I need is someone with a US address….

Ben Dunne has bought hours of radio air-time on Newstalk over the last month telling everyone about his new website that would revolutionise buying of stuff and doing of things that was coming on the 19th of October. It caught my eye because nobody does a hard launch on the Internet. The accepted wisdom is to soft launch/beta the website first to iron out the kinks and build up some content and then put out the ads. Out of curiosity I took a look at his site today and it’s an empty page for some reason, so that marketing investment is largely wasted.

He (or his advisors) is exhibiting a strange naïveté about the ways of internet business for someone so successful in other areas. Geography is immaterial and operating costs are minimal so there’s lots of competition for eyeballs and wallets. Your business either needs to be either new, better or cheaper; and preferably at least two of the three. Bendunne.ie or his previous attempt tenderme.ie (also launched in the same way) is none of these.

Adverts.ie, an offshoot of boards.ie, crucially realise that the buyers don’t come unless there’s a large volume of sellers. The only way to get a large volume of sellers is if you have a large volume of buyers (like eBay), or you make it cheap enough that they’ll list there products on the off chance… Crucially by charging a fee bendunne.com are reducing the volume of sellers as who’s going to pay for a listing on a site with no track record? Adverts.ie makes it’s money by embedding Google AdWords advertising in the listings and allows anyone to list for free. They’re listing 1000+ items each day and generating serious traffic, and traffic = money.