Buying Software Components

Ian Landsman shares his story about buying software components. On the very beginning he tried to write it on his own. I can’t say I’d support the idea – Userscape (Ian's company) focus is to provide helpdesk software not to be UI components programmer. What more, being a micro-ISV, it would be almost impossible for him to support and develop those components in the future. I believe that narrow focus brings you closer to a success and in a case of obtaining software components it means you should often consider buying them.

Another episode in Ian’s story is buying a cheap menu and ending up with some issues with it. Finally he bought another one, few times more expensive, and it looks like he’s satisfied at least. As a conclusion Ian states that “being cheap is only a path to heartache and support requests.”

I can’t say I fully agree on that one. I think the main issue here was not the price, but functionality of bought component. I guess the last menu wouldn’t be worse only because someone cut its price. When we were choosing some UI components to buy we’d made some analysis first, covering different sources from free up to unreasonably expensive ones. And we chose an option which was priced fairly and had more than satisfying range of features. Yes, we spent some time on that, but it paid off. Even internal report with analysis appeared to be useful months later when we had justified some investment.

Don’t be cheap, but remember the price is only one of ingredients. Sometimes the most important one, sometimes not.