Steve’s right, responsible software development is a complex, tricky business. Maybe there is a middle ground between black-box software development and low-profit open source?

After the interactive conference in June I challenged my team to build a marketplace site inspired by LJ’s. This is about 80% done. It took about 200 labor hours, well within the budget of most medium sized papers.

http://intodaysmarket.com

PS: Ryan, want to be the first member of our affiliate program?

I’m imagining a team of two developers and a “people person,” getting tired of working with vendors and seeking to produce one small application at a time.

37signals is more of a model for me than Gannett: See a need, fill it, keep it simple, take an agile and iterative approach to development. Think like a start-up, not a conglomerate.

I don’t think any newspaper company has taken that approach yet; I don’t see simple applications when I look at their products — I see overfeatured bloatware produced in an attempt to meet *every* possible need of *every* property that might use it.

But I’d love to exchange some examples here…

“Just pick any one of those that pops up in the next month or so, and go at it. … After you’ve launched it and earned the praise of your peers, slap a price tag on a license and get to work marketing it.”

That’s like driving down the street, spotting an empty storefront, renting the building and then trying to figure out what business you’re in.

Smart business decisions are not random.

This is not new territory. Newspapers have been developing software for years. Many companies have marketed their software. Nando did it. Gannett has done it. We at Morris have been selling software since around 2000, and currently have installations serving Belo, Advance, Media General, the Washington Post, and companies in Brazil, Australia and Denmark.

It’s not as simple as hanging up a shingle and declaring you’re in the software sales business.

Sales costs money. Sales support costs money. Installation support costs money. Operational support costs money. Do you have a call center?

And what are you going to do when you have sales contracts that require performance and service level guarantees, and a sudden internal need arises that you can’t meet because your resources are all encumbered?

And how long will it be before the randomly chosen application you’re selling is surpassed by a free, open-source alternative?

Marketing, by the way, doesn’t start after development. It starts before development.

Marketing is about understanding the needs of potential customers, assessing the competitive landscape, and identifying a set of benefits and only then creating a product.

Then, if you’re working in a tech field, you do it all over again. Because technology moves quickly, and today’s great idea is tomorrow’s old hat.

I’m raising these issues because they’re all real. There is a whole herd of elephants in this particular room, and they have been known to stampede.