Mike's Blog

Hi Sid,

I'm less inclined to argue the price of ColdFusion Builder and more inclined to express my dissatisfaction with those who take exception with the people who do argue it. I like CF Builder a lot and I am fortunate enough to work for a company that has the budget to supply all of us with licenses. I agree that the product is top notch and worthy of a fair price and if that's $299, so be it. But the thread on CF-Talk and some of the negative remarks I've read against those who either disagree or simply can't afford it bother me. I feel their argument that competing open source alternatives to application development are a challenge and that a $300 IDE adds more of a barrier is a legitimate argument. I'm seeing these folks get slammed in discussion threads, just as many known community members did in my comments after my lost post from yesterday.

Thanks for your comments BTW!

I agree that pricing of a product is subjective. The value of a product to a user is not as subjective since we can calculate how much we use the product versus current methods. My feeling is $299 is on par with Adobe software in general which usually runs on the high side. The price of the Creative Suite, Acrobat, and some others are sobering.

One thing that pissed some people off was the bundling which made it look like they were pushing you to buy an unwanted product FB4 Standard which many thought pushed up the price of the bundle too high. I assume that the Adobe team didn't have this in mind at all and would have priced just CFB $299 anyway. It sort of looks like a lame attempt to push Flex on CF developers to many which jacked up the package price. The vast majority of CF developers are unlikely to use FB4.

I attended the TACFUG CFBuilder event last night and remain undecided on whether to purchase CFB / FB4 or continue to use CFEclipse. Currently, I am thinking that I'll wait until the 1.1 version before deciding. There were so many bugs in the beta that it actually felt like an alpha version. I hesitate to buy 1.0 of any software.

My take on the bundling is that it's actually a brilliant idea as far as getting Flex tools into the hands of ColdFusion developers. Flex Builder was an awesome product, and Flash Builder is likely more of the same plus! I know from playing with the beta that it includes tighter integration tools with ColdFusion. I think people will try it now that they have it at their fingertips and they'll begin using it.

Mike, I agree that Flash Builder is a great product. I’ve played with it too and even traveled to DC for a free one-day training with CFBuilder and Flash Builder that Adobe offered. I also agree that selling CFB and FB as a bundle is a great idea. But that’s not my point. My point is that Adobe forces you to get the bundle. Now, if RogerTheGeek is right and they would’ve charged $299 (or $249) for CFBuilder by itself and we’re getting FB as a bonus, then that’s great! BUT if they could’ve offered CFBuilder for $199, why not let ME make the decision whether or not to shell out the extra $100 for the bundle (which would also be a great deal)? I probably would’ve gotten the bundle anyway but would feel better about not being forced to do so.

I ran into this problem as well yesterday. If the beta is suppose to expired (not sure why since it did not have all the fixes), that is fine, I can deal with it. My issue yesterday was when I came into to start working, I opened a file, and a message stated the beta had expired. I had no warning this was going to happen. I don't remember any blog postings stating the beta would expire. I have to find a justification, and a pot of gold to get the money from my company to purchase Builder...and I am still working on that. Now, I have the 60 day trial, but if I can't get the money, I am back to cfeclipse...i will survive.
I guess I would have been great to know this was going to happen so soon.
Flash Builder, that is a nice thing to have included, except for one thing, we don't do any Flex or Flash work here, so it is not necessary, so we are paying for something we are not and may not use.

This is just a pain...I have done my best to get around all these issues, just thought I'd add my 2 cents here.

I really like what I can do with Builder and hope to get the money to continue to use it in the future.

Brian, that's very well said. I think you're 100% right about that. Excellent point.

I'm a bit late to the game I see - but wow, awesome post Mike! I would have loved to seen the comments from the original post. I'm taking away from this what you so poignantly stated in your first comment response to Sid about being disappointed by the general response from the community if you happen to disagree with the price of admission for CFB.

Me, I'm in the "not worth it" column currently. But I'll be attending Terrence Ryan's CFMeetup preso tomorrow to see what it is that I'm missing. I'm genuinely curious.

@Brian, thanks for pointing that out. I'll be joining that presentation tomorrow also, along with the BlazeDS presentation.

Well considering that it was built on top of a free, open source platform and it is built to work with an application server that already costs money why not give it away or sell it for no more than 100 bucks? Do you remember back when ColdFusion Studio came bundled with ColdFusion server (I do)? I'm easing into using the demo for about a week or so now but I've got to ask myself - what does it do better than CF Eclipse? This is a problem in my view because open source leveled the playing field and allowed organized groups of devs to compete and in some cases flat out beat corporations at their own game. Now that corporations have "sponsored" open source initiatives they too can leverage these projects and turn a quick buck off of them. And btw, Adobe has spent shite on marketing and support. Terrence, I like you a lot but I've tried "talking" to your sales folks on the phone and they're worthless.

I along with Craig am anxiously awaiting 1.1 or 1.5 of CFBuilder.

Tony, I'm with you. My perception was that code insight with CFBuilder was better than that of CFEclipse, unarguably better for those working with CF9. My recommendation would be to join the ColdFusion meetup presentation this morning for a full explanation of the feature set. I'll be there.

The touchiness that the CF community exhibits towards the subject of pricing likely stems from years of having to defend itself against the proponents of free/OS alternatives such as PHP and RoR. And now, with free alternatives within the CFML community (such as CFEclipse, Railo, and OpenBD), there's probably even more of a defensive attitude. I've always thought that the benefits of developing with Adobe CF vs PHP/RoR/.NET justfied its price. But I do think it's unfortunate that people to tend to get attacked even within the CF community when they have anything critical to say about how Adobe prices its products.

IMHO, increased productivity is due to the following, in order of importance:

1) Company/management objectives and their ability to find the balance between the deadlines that produce crap code and the deadlines that allow the team to produce scalable software.
2) The ability for the development leads/managers to properly train the team in proper
software development methodologies and best practices.
3) The ability of the team as a whole to actually execute these practices.
4) Proper safeguards are in place - unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests,
continuous integration etc.
5) The type of programming platform chosen - Java, CF, PHP, ASP .NET.

For me, an IDE for ColdFusion falls somewhere in the double digits in terms of rank and importance. Autocomplete, tag insight, integrated debugger, integration with Flash... Yea it's cool to an extent but come on this is not Java or .NET. CF doesn't have insane amounts of packages and API's that one single person cannot be expected to remember like in other strongly typed languages like Java. CF doesn't need to be constantly compiled by an IDE in the background to ensure the application can launch. CF isn't that hard to debug. Not everyone will use ORM blindly without a good reason.

Of that large segment of the community who has reportedly asked Adobe to create CFBuilder, were they also aware of the $300 price point? Of that segment, how many of them were already using a free tool like Eclipse? Of that segment how many of them only have a couple developers on the team? How many of them, if they had say a team of 20 devs, would willingly spend $6,000 for an IDE on top of the CF licenses they are already churning out cash for? Forget the segment of "developers" asking for it, what about the businesses these developers work for? Would the business sign off on it?

Don't expect that you can take something free, that is SO rooted in the community like (CF)Eclipse, add some things to it and bundle it for $300 and expect businesses and developers to sit by and take it.

Give me my CF9 syntax highlighting in CFEclipse, I can do without the rest. We can take that $6,000 and invest it training engineers to write better software.

Writing good software is my measurement of productivity.

Outrage, hardly - disagreement, absolutely. As others who have spent much of their career (close to 11 years in my case) advancing, supporting and adamantly defending ColdFusion have a right to speak our minds about such issues without being accused of attempting to bring down the very technology within which we are so heavily invested - or being turned into community pariahs.

@Micky - It's "funny" how the opinion thing works both ways. Some people see those who have an opinion -for- the product as being Adobe fanbois who are incapable of being objective. To be crystal clear, I'm not saying, suggesting, or otherwise implying that you (or even anyone in these particular comments) have taken that stance. But trust me... for everyone who is not a proponent of CFB (for one reason or another) who feels like they're getting slammed for voicing their opinion, there's somebody who is a proponent who's getting slammed for being a mindless drone. Just wanted to point out that that particular street is indeed two ways :)

As far as the "only" option that Adobe gives them... I'd argue that Adobe gives you two options. The first, of course, is to drop $300 per seat (assuming there's no volume licensing available) on CFBuilder. The second is to not drop $300 per seat and go with one of the alternatives. Maybe it's CFEclipse or TextMate or Coda or Dreamweaver or IntelliJIDEA or...

I do disagree with your point (or at least, what I'm inferring from your statement) about the price point and the fact that CFB is "build upon what was once a free open source project". I assume you're referring to Eclipse itself, which is still a free, open source project. Adobe feels that the value of what they've added with CFBuilder is worth a certain amount of money. There are other plugins to the free open source project that are also commercial.

To your point (and I agree wholeheartedly), fewer keystrokes from an IDE is not an accurate measurement of productivity. It does help, though. If you can write "good software" you can do it in any IDE. Heck, you can do it in Notepad. If a particular IDE helps you do it in a more expeditious manner, great. If that IDE is CFBuilder, or if it's CFEclipse, or if it's any of the other alternatives, great.

In any event... assuming that I can write good software (because let's face it, if I can't, no IDE is going to magically make the code that I write "good"), and further assuming that CFB allows me to write that good software in a more productive manner, then arguably the $300 I'm spending will be recovered in a relatively short period of time.

If there are 10 of me at "Company Y", and the engineering managers have to spend $3000 on 10 licenses, they're still arguably going to recover that investment in a relatively short period of time.

The CIOs, CTOs, engineering managers, etc are aware that IT is essentially not a profit center. We require money for resources (be it hardware or software). Every hour we work generally costs the company money. I've worked for a number of companies where the IT department did nothing but work on internal applications. There was never any notion that the apps that we wrote would generate revenue or bring in any money. Yet, year after year, we were provided with new hardware, new software, etc. Why? Because the apps that we wrote were meant to help the organization perform more efficiently. In other words... every $ spent on us was seen as an investment. The CIOs, CTOs, engineering managers all understood that. Yes, they have to keep costs down, but if they're worth a dime, these people understand that a $3000 investment in software for a team of 10 is just that. An investment.

As far as TCO... and I mentioned this in Mike's last entry (the one that got eaten by the database monster), if you're on CF9... TCO has actually dropped. You no longer need to purchase licenses for staging servers or other non-production servers. And let's face it... one of the holy grails of arguments regarding CF itself is the whole TCO notion. Yes, it costs more up front, but due to the fact that, generally speaking, I can deliver my app in a shorter timeframe, the TCO over time is actually less than with competing technologies.

Either way... what it really should come down to (IMO, of course), is... does the software make you more productive? If the answer is yes... then invest the $300. If it's $300x10, you're not spending $3000, you're investing in the tools that your 10 developers need to be more productive.

Again, and not to over simplify or sound like a broken record, but I don't think the argument of $300 being the right price is a good argument to make. My argument is whether or not we, as a community, can make the argument without getting destroyed. Regarding total cost of ownership, and taking out paid licenses for dev/test/staging environments, the cost of 3 load balanced Enterprise licenses for a production front office application, 3 load balanced Enterprise licenses for a production front office application for another division, and 2 load balanced Standard licenses for public facing websites is a fair amount of change. The original argument was on top of that cost, there's also a cost for the IDE for each developer on the team. That value can be quantified, but is ultimately subjective. Hence, the reason one might be compelled to argue.

Whether you believe there's a desire to conspire against Adobe and ColdFusion, or that disagreeing with a list price undermines a company's effort, (and I believe neither of these are accurate truths) the fact is when I submitted a purchase order for ColdFusion Builder (which I already deemed was worth using for my entire team) by boss raised an eyebrow and reminded me of what our server licenses cost. THAT is a compelling fact and the basis behind my original post.

I believe that most of those arguing against the $300 price are compelled to do so because they WANT a product that's sanctioned by Adobe but are exhausted at having to continue to defend their ColdFusion related expenses. Value for the dollars spent has less to do with it than politics does, in my opinion. With JSP offering Apache Tomcat and Eclipse IDE for Java EE, just one example, decision makers in larger companies DO start questioning these expenses, no matter how small or of little consequence they may seem to Adobe or the ColdFusion community.

Let us know what you like/dislike about CB (including the price) or what you like about your current tool (15 min survey).

http://bit.ly/StormSurvey

(Sorry for the repeated comments - shoulda caught up first then posted.)

I'm really surprised by what seems like a view that CF Bloggers (the well know ones) are "ganging up" on detractors. Last time I checked we were all allowed to have an opinion, and while I disagree with folks who think CFB is too expensive, I would hope we can have a discussion about it w/o becoming nasty.

@Adam-

Perfect, you said it yourself. You took Eclipse(Free), CFEclipse Snippets(Free) and CFEclipse dictionary file (Free), and rolled it into CFB.

So my question to you now is how come we couldn't get the open sourced FREE features that you rolled into CFB as a FREE CFB Lite version? Simple syntax highlighting and code complete without the other stuff? Instead you are charging us who want that simplicity. THAT was my point.

CFE gave me the points you mentioned above for free, why cant Adobe? Especially since you said you already "donated" those dictionaries and snippets back to them. If that's the case then it probably only a matter of time before we see a CFE CF9 plugin.

Get a grip? I'm trying to be polite here. I think you made a mistake. I pointed it out. Folks do that all the time on my own blog. Maybe your feeling a bit defensive? As it stands, I think next time Adobe does a _public_ beta, it should be have a super clear, firm warning about when it times outs, so there is no misunderstandings. Even though I think you made a mistake (and seriously, do you have a problem with me saying so? I'm sure you can find plenty of mistakes on my blog ;) I do see some merit in the provider (of the beta software I mean) being more vocal about it.

Wow.. a large number of comments.

As a Product Manager, I did want to throw a different perspective on this. Any organization, large, like Adobe, or small like my company, when developing a new product from scratch, has to make tremendous investments across the board. You setup a new team, incur one-time costs, and then you make compromises and fight for what you believe customers want against corporate interests. The role of a product manager is tough.

Its no wonder that CFB costs $299. I do imagine if it catches on and the ROI is there, and that with maintenance costs being less than startup costs, Adobe could see to dropping the price later on. But you have to recoup the costs... Quite frankly, if you support where the product is headed, $299 shouldn't be that big a deal - considering that its the main tool you will use day in and day out.

But getting back to the PM role, its disheartening to see people then attack pricing and lead the conversation on the product launch to something that isn't helpful. People asked for a product, the product manager fights hard for it, he understand its not perfect, and sometimes people don't understand the sacrifices he's made.

All I can say is that Adam did a good job on a 1.0 product, and I have no doubt the next version is going to be even better. In fact, I'm counting on it.

Ray, don't believe your own press. You're not always right. You said "do you know what _beta_ software means? Do you know that _beta_ software expires?" Yes Ray, I do, and yes Ray, that's condescending. I was aware, as was my team, that we were running beta and that it would expire. That wasn't the point and was never a problem. It was just what you attached your remarks to. I was whining because I hadn't received my licenses before the expiration. My purchasing department should be the one taking a condescending position, not you. The point of the post was that it was a shame that the argument against a $300 fee was met with hostility. It was never, ever a complaint about it timing out. Never.

The strange thing is that my team likes ColdFusion Builder, adopted it, and dug in and got to know it better after Terry Ryan's demo on meetup.com, but you're too hung up on being right about what you said and what you meant that you don't realize we don't have anything to fight about.

I'm like the rest of them Ray. I read your books and have been reading your blog for years. But if you're going to be nasty in blind defense of Adobe because you've misread my remarks as an attack, I'm not so star struck that I'm going to bow down. Your remarks were mean spirited and condescending and par for the course for what one can expect when they take an unpopular position.

Yes, I'll break my silence here too. You are out of your league here Chandler. Raymond is pretty much dead on. Maybe you should read his blog some more and learn something. If you don't like that betas expire, you shouldn't be using them. Period.

Yeah, this comment thread has gotten a little nuts, I think due to some misunderstandings and misinterpretations (which is always the danger when trying to convey nuance in written form). I think we should just relax and not make more of this than we should.
Bottom line is that some people will find value in CFB and buy it and others won't and will use something else. And we should all respect each others' opinions and be able to discuss them intelligently no matter how much they differ from our own.
(and yeah, I think your "Subscribe" feature isn't working, Mike)

@Shaun McGran, when Adam said 1/5 of CF developers use CFEclipse I was shocked. There are about 800,000 CF developers and that would mean 160,000 of them are using CFEclipse... I just don't believe that number (no offense Adam) so I certainly don't believe your claim of 80% using CFEclipse. Perhaps 80% of the sample of developers you know but I think we all need to bear in mind that the "community" as we see it - through blogs and twitter and mailing lists and conferences - represents a TINY percentage of the total developer base for CF! Even CFUnited, the single largest CF event in the world, nets only about 0.1% of all CF developers worldwide. If we get 50% of attendees saying they use CFEclipse, that's not representative of the CF market as a whole (and depending on which session you ask that question in, it ranges from 30% to about 80%).

@Mike, I saw it brought up a couple of times but I don't recall a specific response: was there any reason your team didn't just install the 60 day trial once CFB was released so you weren't beholden to either the beta expiry or your purchasing departments leisurely process?

@Micky, you asked "So my question to you now is how come we couldn't get the open sourced FREE features that you rolled into CFB as a FREE CFB Lite version?" - isn't that what CFEclipse already is? It's free and it has those features. Adobe's charging for the value-add on top of that - which seems to be not worth it for you (fair enough) but plenty worthwhile for others. And don't forget that the CF dictionaries in CFEclipse came from Adobe originally, as did quite a bit of assistance early on. The CFEclipse team were flown out to Newton and Adobe tried hard to work with them to improve CFEclipse. I was involved as a liaison between the teams when I still worked at Adobe. Adobe delivered everything they promised but the CFEclipse team dropped the ball - and have publicly admitted this. That's partly why CFEclipse isn't better than it is (and nearly all of the improvements since that point have come from Mark Drew after he took over the project).

And Micky, I never said nor implied that having an opinion against CFB undermined Adobe's work. Adam clearly picked up on what I meant by my comment in his response to you.

@Sean, this is the most critical statement yet! You said "...but I think we all need to bear in mind that the "community" as we see it - through blogs and twitter and mailing lists and conferences - represents a TINY percentage of the total developer base for CF!" That needed to be said!

Regarding the 60 day demo, it just didn't occur to us as embarrassing as that fact is. I think I just assumed that I had been running the beta for months on end and that a trial wouldn't register, a la Windows trial software. Since we had to uninstall anyway, we just waited for the license keys which actually arrived the following day.

@All-

Good points from all involved on this thread. Everyone has valid opinions for sure. Let's move on and get back to work ;)