(2008-02-01) Goranson Outlining Ecosystem

Ted Goranson on what's need for a healthy future for OutLining. I think we need three big things to keep the outliner-using application community strong. We need better XML standards than OPML. We need a revolution in user interfaces (UI), adding more advanced outliner-specific capabilities. And now I add a third: we need a wider range of workable Business Model-s. In the last case, he focuses on a particular example: Mori tried an innovative business model: the developer put the users in charge of development with a fairly elaborate feature request and voting system; he was extremely open, down to even reporting unit sales on his Web site; and he gave away the core framework of Mori in expectations that it would spawn an open source community. This failed. Hog Bay Software is one man only, and he just could not make a living. He had to go get a "real job," (DayJob) working on Mori after hours. Eventually, he sold Mori to another developer, Apokalypse Software, where it may thrive.