Following MacWorld, Reg Developer started a rumor [1] that VBA would be going away from future versions of Microsoft Office for Windows. The speculation was based on Office 2008 for Mac dropping VBA (a big blunder by Microsoft, IMHO) and on Microsoft dropping their licensing program for 3rd parties to incorporate VBA into their applications.
Sometimes […]

Fog Creek released a new version of FogBugz this week with something called Evidence Based Scheduling. It feeds project tasks and developer characteristics, along with historical data, into a Monte Carlo simulation then builds a probability distribution for project completion.
By coincidence, I was reading about statistical methods for project estimation several months ago. (All I […]

Update: The method described below will cause IE7 to drop the extension. A modified version is pending.
Until recently, I had no idea that IE6 cached downloads. I knew page and image caching were issues, but I didn’t know if affected exe’s and zip’s as well.
FlowBreeze 2.0 was released 11 days ago, putting some of the […]

Until this past week, I’ve never been able to tell whether AdWords was paying for itself or not. Somewhere between my ads and the payment processors, my tracking lost its way. It all hinged on a) the tracking working through the payment processors or b) the customer clicking the link to return to the BreezeTree […]

The Business of Software blog posted Part II of their microISV survey. (Part I van be found here.) I have to admit that I was surprised by some of the low revenue numbers. But I’m one of those obstinate people who refuses to believe something when it doesn’t fit his world view. At least for […]

Due to the recent incompatibilities between Vista and the crappy 3rd party licensing tool I use for FlowBreeze, I have been re-examining how I look at anti-piracy protection. I’ve decided it all boils down to a simple formula:
PL = F(SLS + SE + LS - DT)
Where, PL = Piracy Loss (i.e. the revenues lost due […]

Everyone knows that Google is king when it comes to generating traffic for your website. In fact, many webmasters practically disregard Yahoo and MSN altogether in their SEO efforts. And software download sites? Their time has passed, right?
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t agree with those statements. I look at my stats everyday, […]

Thanks to Matt Inglot for writing my belated New Year’s resolution for me. (Yeah, I’m running a little behind on that one.) The recent tax season has convinced me his 5 Tips for Staying on Top of Your Books for Small Business Owners is just the sort of advice that I should be implementing. Especially […]

It may sound nutty, but I decided to use Excel 2007 to re-design my website. OK, the title of this post is a bit misleading. I didn’t actually design the web pages themselves with Excel 2007, but I did use it to create all the new graphics.
The Excel 2007 development team did a wonderful job […]

Overwhelmed by all the advice you read about running an AdWords campaign? Here’s a simple and concise list I’ve gathered from several reliable sources:

Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
Put keywords in […]

One of the more frustrating things about selling online is dealing with AVS mismatches. Sometimes you get an email from a customer complaining that your payment processor won’t accept their credit card. Most of the time, though, the sale is lost without notice - unless you’re scanning your transaction logs daily.
So What is an AVS […]

I wanted to say Thanks! to all the BreezeTree customers who have made this a great first year.
The first six months were a little slow, but after the release of FlowBreeze 1.2, sales really started to pick up. FlowBreeze (a Flowchart Generator for Excel) has benefited from a lot of word of mouth marketing. Plus, […]