misanthropic nonsense

Wil Shipley announced the recent launch of Delicious Library 2.

Congratulations to Wil. His software has always been top notch, and I don’t expect anything less from DL2.

Delicious Monster has been one of a few companies that we follow closely. Certain companies have admirable business practices. Others have interesting product release strategies. Running a growing software company is difficult, and trying to adapt some of the working strategies of other companies is understandable. Companies of all sizes continuously scan and assess the playing field.

But it isn’t the product announcement that got my attention in that post; it’s the announcement of the founding of Golden % Braeburn.

Wil has founded the new firm as part of a plan to license out the technology behind the embeddable e-commerce infrastructure which is used within Delicious Library. In a nutshell (if interested, you should read more about it – the infrastructure seems very well architected), the code allows Mac software vendors to embed purchasing logic directly into their applications rather than having their potential customers go out to the web to pay for and receive their registration codes.

I agree that it would have been a waste not to license out the technology – what bothers me is why this necessitated the founding of a new company.

Now, I’m not saying that Wil necessarily made a mistake with this. No-one knows Wil’s market better than Wil, but building a company with differing product lines is something that’s been on my mind for a long time, and the more I ponder over it, the more I lean toward the opinion that differing product lines do not justify the founding of separate corporate entities.

I understand that when you’re a small software firm, and your entire revenue stream comes from one product, it may seem somehow cleaner that, with an introduction of a seemingly unrelated product, one would need to set up a dedicate entity responsible for that product. I understand this completely. I’m just not sure if it makes sense.

Setting up corporate subsidiaries is something that larger companies do frequently. But this is mostly for accounting and tax purposes.

When a small product company does something like this, it‚Äôs always obvious that the founder is worried that his or her customers will somehow be confused by the introduction of this new thing ‚Äì that somehow sales will slow or stop as this once streamlined sale pipeline is all of the sudden halted to by customers sitting in front of their computers, holding their credit cards, waiting to buy your popular product A, but not pulling the trigger because of the presence of this new product B. They don‚Äôt know what product B does — it‚Äôs confusing ‚Äì it has the words API and SSL in it. Maybe this product A that they were really looking forward to is not looking so good anymore?

Nonsense…

We make BlackBerry applications and BlackBerry games right now. It wasn’t always so, but that’s the market we’re in now. We make great software for the BlackBerry. Our customers love us as a company and love our software. We’re in this market for the long-haul. But it wasn’t always like this – Antair used to make developer tools and browser plugins for the desktop. And it won’t always be like this – Antair Games will be launching soon, as will several additional products targeting the small business market and the financial market.

But none of these products will hide from the Antair brand. Quite the opposite – we don’t even have cutesy names for our software. Our spam filter is the Antair BlackBerry Spam Filter. Our Call Screener is the Antair BlackBerry Call Screener. Our upcoming desktop games will simply live on a separate domain – but I can’t justify putting up a DBA or a subsidiary out of a belief that people will somehow stop buying our BlackBerry applications because we have a dedicated games division.

The range of products sold by the larger software companies of the world is massive. Don’t like that example? OK – try Stardock – award winning games, enormously popular UI customization software, several websites (not to mention a distribution and publishing division). One person could be using their UI customization software and playing one of their games, and not even know the two products were made under the same roof – it doesn’t matter. They probably don’t cross-sell one to the other – different markets. But they also don’t try to hide it – there’s no reason for it.

Different companies do things differently. Some companies don’t have any issues with licensing out their infrastructure as part of their business model. Wil’s decision may prove to be the right one, or it could be a mistake – only time will tell.

But from the perspective of a growing software company that just went through a massive office move and hiring cycle, I couldn’t image balancing the logistics of founding another company on the side.