I know if I was attempting to launch something like SIMPOL and the consumers were being "turned off" by my website I would sure want to know, IMHO.
Just a thought.
-CodeTRUCKER
Oh, that's just me being a prick!
I once had career as an accountant, and (later) a corporate financial planner in a Fortune 500 company. I even have a piece of parchment with some beautifully engraved paragraphs in Latin attesting to a degree in the same - so I tend to get a mite opinionated and ornery when it comes to financial software.
I think the thing that bothered me was that the website wasn't really finished. When you are planning on releasing a product to the business community, you really can't afford to have links dead-ending, downloads not easily available, or confusing navigation. Far better to hold off until you're ready to roll.
And the amount of information required for registration is ridiculous, not to mention flying in the face of everything we've learned about how to conduct that sort of thing. In this day and age, site registrations should require little (if anything) more than a valid e-mail address.
If they're serious about this, they need to get familiar with the best practices of the software industry. Right now they're releasing a relatively unknown and somewhat unusual product in a crowded and mature market. If it were my product, I'd consider it time to be running in full evangelistic mode, whereby I'd be doing everything I could to get my product into as many hands as possible in order to create product awareness and some buzz in the press.
They need to provide easily obtainable downloads, minimal registration hassles, a newsletter chock full of useful information and case studies, and a ton of sample applications for people to look at and build on. In short, they need to come out with both guns blazing if they hope to be anything more than a niche product. Taking a high-brow marketing approach seldom works. One superb business application (Javelin Plus) made the mistake of doing that back in the days of DOS, and is now remembered as an interesting bit of software history rather than the application that perfected and ultimately replaced the ordinary spreadsheet.
FWIW, I did pop a few suggestions over to them. It will be interesting to see how they react.
I intend to give this little urchin of theirs a tryout, although I think their asking price of $499 for the "Pro" version is a little on the proud side. Be interesting to see how well that number works out for them.
Also, thanks for finding and sharing your find on the forum 'CT'. I sometimes wonder what's become of a few apps that seemed to have disappeared over the years. Superbase was one of them.
