You may not think about this too much, but the corporate I.T. folks think about it a lot and since I’ve been there before, I do too.
I’m not talking about death and taxes here.
It’s the “make vs buy” decision, but slightly camouflaged.
Most of my readers are not corporate I.T. geeks with lots of resources available to them. Right? Isn’t that your situation? You probably operate on a small budget, and you’re probably affiliated with a nonprofit, and your salary, much like your employer’s budget, is probably a bit slim. So any time you can get an online service free of charge, they’ve got your undivided attention. Well how do you make the decision to use a free tool when the functioning of your enterprise is going to rely upon it? [read on…]
I notice that a large percentage of the “customers” I deal with on a day-to-day basis use the free email (hotmail, gmail, and so forth), and use free blogging (blogger.com, wordpress.com, and so forth), and many use free emailers (Eudora in “sponsored” mode) and other “free” services such as del.icio.us. (A few of them even use Linux – the ultimate in free software!) The question is “when is free good enough and when should you used services that cost you something?”
To illustrate, here’s a current dilemma I’m facing. I have a database that I have created “locally.” We have built a lot of software and have the database available to the public on our web server. I want the data to be broadly available online to a wide variety of people. I can keep it up on my own server, where it is now and has been since 2001, which costs me money, or I can transform it and convert to use a “free” service (in this case del.icio.us) and hope that their service will remain available, without charge, for the useful life of my service. Del.icio.us is actually not the best example because they’re now a part of Yahoo and I don’t think Yahoo’s going away anytime soon, but let’s say this was 12 months ago and they were a freestanding independent company whose prospects were uncertain. Then you’ll appreciate the dilemma.
How do I decide whether to throw in my lot with a small company whose pedigree and future I cannot really guarantee, by basing my whole service on their underlying free service, or whether to go with a paid service?
Here are some of the factors I used in making my decision:
- How much time & money am I investing that would be blown away if the free service failed?
- How long would it take me to recover if their company went out of business – or if the product or service ceased being free?
- If they started charging, how much would I be willing to pay?
- Is there an alternative service that I could switch to at that time?
- Could I recover my information and bring it back onto my own platform (servers, software)
In the case of my database migration, moving it to del.icio.us means that the people who help me maintain the database will be using an interface they’re familiar with – and so will the “customers” of the service. As long as I can “checkpoint” the information from the service and export it in a form that I could recover it from, I feel that the transition makes sense. It scores high on each of my factors.
But I wonder how those of you who use wordpress.com, for instance, would feel if suddenly the service were discontinued or you had to pay a monthly charge to use it, and you had no way to migrate your blog elsewhere. Would you just move on, leaving all your blog entries to vaporize? Would you pay for the service? Would you use different criteria than I have outlined above?
–By the way, this post was created in the Flock blogging tool, but further editing was carried out in ecto, another of those offline blog-editing tools. Ecto allows more control over the editing and posting of entries in your blog, costs [USD] $17.95 and versions exist for both Mac and Windows (well, of course Flock is multi-platform too). In my case that’s really good because my clients are a mixed bag and use both hardware platforms, so I need to be able to recommend cross-platform software, otherwise I’d go nuts trying to remember how all the various tools work on the different platforms. Ecto received a “4.5 mice” rating (out of a possible 5) from MacWorld magazine. So far I’ve used it about two hours, and though the ramp-up time was more than I would have liked, it has been able to do everything I need done.
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