Mark Alldritt’s Postmortem on FaceSpan 5

Mark Alldritt:

I am a self-funded Indie (lone) developer. I made a number of classic business blunders on the FaceSpan 5 project. I broke the golden rule: never (never!) rewrite a software product. I massively underestimated the effort required to complete the product. I set off without having sufficient resources to complete the project. Because I took so long to complete my work, the market moved on — AppleScript’s importance to the customers I intended to target declined. Some may argue that the market was never really there to provide a return for a product of this complexity. Finally, I didn’t pull the plug soon enough. Hindsight its great.

He may be right about that golden rule, but, his aborted rewrite of FaceSpan was truly a magnificent idea. It may well have been a doomed-from-the-start business idea, but it was a marvelous software idea.

★ Tuesday, 8 May 2012