938 karma · joined August 6, 2011
Think of a job, Say after 10-20 years of very hard work. You probably either want a promotion or have changed companies. Just done something different. Sometimes for an owner the only way to do something different is to sell.
Another common reason is to get some skin out of the game. As an analogy do you invest all your stocks into one company? As an owner often all your finances are directly tied to the company’s success. It can be wise to diversify from just your company.
There are a number of reasons but these are just two common ones unrelated to how the company is doing, good or bad.
Back in the dot com days I had a friend who sold his options early. He made enough to pay off his house cash. The price kept going up and he could’ve been a millionaire. But then as we all know the bottom fell out and his company crashed hard, almost overnight. He was happy he sold out. Had he waited he may have gotten nothing. He may not have cashed out st the peak but he definitely got a good deal for his options. And every time some tells him he should’ve waited to get millions he tried to remind them he probably wouldn’t gotten zero if he waited. Most people still don’t get that, they just focus on what the highest value could’ve been, even if that’s the least likely price he would’ve gotten in reality.
Also how far back are they going to patch?
I know from experience that we deal with a ton of Mac specific issues that are annoying and frustrating and are due to either low quality or they just won’t fix cause it will be obsolete soon. So many items.
I’m OS agnostic but I will say that in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had to deal with many more Mac spaecifc issues then Windows specific issues. All kinds of random stuff just not working that should be. I can’t speak for Linux distros cause we don’t support Linux directly, but in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had to implement many a workaround to Mac specific OS bugs. Like things just not working. In some cases Apple stated thue had no intentions on fixing it. Not esoteric bugs but big ones that required big workarounds.
Anyways I suspect the results would be the same her between people who develop on a Mac vs those that develop FOR the Mac :(
I wrote about it here: http://www.followsteph.com/2006/10/10/is-technical-phone-sup...
I then followed it up with an article discussing whether or not companies should charge for support based on my findings in the previous article: http://www.followsteph.com/2010/10/19/should-software-compan...
The short version, under the $1000 price point it's very hard to economically offer free phone support as part of your product. If you're product is subscription based then the same metric applies using the total lifetime value of your customer. Under that price it's very hard to do, whether your a solo developer or a company without charging for support.