[BeachFreeTrader]

Originally Posted by laureno

yeah but for $160 you could get someone else to make you your own script and teach you how to write it or just learn php for $0 and still have one at the end of the day, i just think $160 for a forum is way overpriced thats all i guess it's all to do with how much time you have on your hands/how fast you want your forum

I was a software developper for 17 years (dBase II, dBase III, clipper, FoxPro, Visual FoxPro ) who now I quit and I strongly disagree with you.

If you build a 1 room house you will have to pay the materials and labor for every room. If you buy a 10 room house every room will be cheaper since you pay once the architect, the engineer, etc, but every room will stil cost you a lot since you must still pay the materials and labor. If you build a 1000 room house the same logic applies: Lower cost, but every room has a very important cost

In software, the price of every program that you sell is almost zero, you may download it from a server, so in many cases the guy that builds a 1000 room palace may get all the market, since making that palace is expensive but the cost of every aditional palace sold is very small, so if one company spends thousand of hours developping great software there are good chances that it would end dominating the market, since they would be able to sell thousands of programs to cover the cost, and every new customer will pay to better and already good program, and customers will lost interest in competing software that is not as good. So in software you actually get the result of thousands of hours of skilled and very expensive labour for almost nothing. This is more or less what happened with Windows, Excel and Word.

I am here in order to choose and purchase bulletin board software. My customer told me that I could program it, I know that would be the best for my personal finances. I say no, it is useless, you should choose a ready made product, debugged, a program that is thousands of hours of labor of many people, a program that is tested, a program thas was used by millions so the features in it represents the needs of those millions users, a program that will go on growing and bettering and you will pay almost nothing for the skilled and expensive labor that is necesary for those improvements.

Anyway learning php has a cost, since time is valuable, and I doubt a single guy can make something as big as vBulletin alone. I tried to do that with accounting software in my Latin American country, and I lost a lot of money (even tough I was not by myself). I just do not want other people to make my mistakes. There is an enormous market for custom made software, I lived from that all my life and lost that money trying to make "off the shelf software". I think one should develop off the shelf software (like vBulletin) ONLY if one has a strong possibility of being the market leader, because the market leader will take all.

If you want a quiet life I suggest forgetting about trying to make "mass software" (I do not know what name to give to software that SHOULD NOT BE CUSTOM MADE, software that solves the problems of millions of persons without needing code changes as vBulletin is) and do only custom software. I just want other people not to repeat my mistakes.

I am here also looking for the market leader, I think vBulletin is it. Probably I will recommend my customer to buy it.