Welcome to Chez Cliff!

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, and the rest of you.

From the bottom of my heart I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

Finally: someone has released a competitor product.

Forgive me if I don’t provide a direct link to their product nor their website.  This is competition and I refuse to drive traffic there.  hehe

Competition is good.  For those politically correct people out there, cover your eyes.  Life has winners and life has losers.  Through some kind of Darwinian evolution, the business with the better product and business model survives.

Fortunately my first tour of duty as an engineer involved competitor analysis.

The knee-jerk reaction to seeing a competitor is usually “Why are they doing it like that?  That’s dumb!”  Finding fault in your competitors puts you on the same level as Steve Ballmer and we’ve all seen the results of his philosophy on the Microsoft brand.  Michael Dell is still eating his words about Apple.

If a customer buys a competitor product, there is a reason why they chose that product over yours.  Something about your competitor convinced your potential client to leave you and go to them.  Do you really thinking you’ll find the answer to your question by trashing your competition?

Smart analysis involves finding out what your competitor does and what do they do that’s better.  For my part, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how my competitor could crush me.  By creating this doomsday scheming, I’ve found several avenues for opportunity that I didn’t notice before.  Also several areas of enhancements came to light.

But studying my competition is not the only applications I”m looking at.

This page is gold.  These are the top applications available for the iPhone.  Measuring my product against the best applications available.  Take the bits and pieces which incorporate customer requests and see how others are doing it.  Take those ideas, incorporate my brand around it, and push out another update.

It’s all about competition.  And who benefits from this Darwin competition?

The customer.

How Cow, this is still a partial real estate blog . . .

Well, to be honest: nothing has been going on.

All of my places are rented.  The tenants are all paying on time.  Life is good.

I’m still kicking around the idea of trying to sell the house again come next spring.  To be honest, I’d much rather have a more stable investment.  Prices continue to drop.  At least as of last quarter they were still inching down.  But I think 2009 is going to be a flat year.

So now that the boring Real Estate Stuff is out of the way, let’s talk about FOOD!

Bacon-wrapped prunes, served along side goat cheese truffles with herbes de provence and parmesan reggiano on toasted baguette.  A little Beaujolais Nouveau to wash it all down.

And a cute girl.  :)

Oh yes it is!

You can’t stop it.

It’s coming.

Brace yourselves!

The Beaujolais Nouvea est arrive!!

Yes true believer, your perfect match to Turkey has been found.  Stop being a fuddy-dud and let the fresh wine flow!

Let’s ask some wise people what they think.

No one that has drunk old wine wants new; for he says, “The old is nice.” –Luke 5:39

“In victory, you deserve Champagne, in defeat, you need it.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

“Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.” – Benjamin Franklin

“What is the definition of a good wine? It should start and end with a smile.” – William Sorkolin

“It is well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking: the arrival of a friend, one’s present or future thirst, the excellence of the wine, or any other reason.” – Latin Proverb

“Wine is bottled poetry.” – Robert Lewis Stevenson

Apple finally approved the Pro version of my software.  It’s now in the wild.  It’s release took too long but the quality control on this was tight.  I think the Russians were irritated with me, for all the minor mods I asked for.  But if I’m going to put something out there, it’s going to be done right.

I’m getting better at these product releases.  Based on the Lite version of the software, I’ve got a standard list of actions to follow when releasing something.  My list goes as follows

1. Update the side menu bar on the website
2. Update the Pro page, stating it’s release
3. Put the demonstration video up
4. Update the page for iPhone visitors
5. Contact those users who wanted to be informed of Pro’s release.

All the new written content was done ahead of time.  A simple “cut and paste” into the site.  What is time consuming is all the formatting required to make the page look decent.  Probably throughout the day I’ll be tweaking it, making it more professional looking.

Now that I’m charging for software, the people should at least be greeted with a professional page.

Part of my campaign involved having a “sign up” list for those wanted to be contacted regarding Pro’s release.  What is a real shame is all the users of the Lite version won’t get any notification that Pro is out there.  Each program is silo’ed in Apple’s store.  I’m trying to figure out how I can get my two programs connected without violating Apple’s goofy rules.

We’re ready to release Lite version 1.1.  And Pro version 1.1 is ready to start development.  I just want to see what kind of response I get from the first version of Pro before spending more money.

I’m sitting here with mixed feelings.  A part of me wants to believe that the wild success of Lite will translate into success for Pro.  I know the program is good.  It’s solid.  But it’s the customer who will be the ultimate judge.