Software is Free?

Spend time in any college town and in time, you'll almost certainly hear of a band named "Free Beer". The trick is that when their band name is on the marquis of a local club, passersby see "Free Beer" prominently displayed and go inside, expecting to get a gratis lager but have their hopes dashed when they find only a mediocre band with a catchy name.

Nowadays, we here a lot about "Free Software". To quote the Free Software Foundation, the GNU Project, "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." For their full article, click here.

In the macro-sense, what happens is:
1. Someone becomes disenchanted with the price of a piece of software
2. They write (alone, with a group of friends or as an open-source community) a "free" alternative, usually in their free-time as a hobby
3. The users see that it's a decent substitute for the "pay-for" version
4. Users abandon the "pay-for" version for the "free" version (jeopardizing or destroying the financial viability for the initial "pay-for" supplier company)
5. Users have questions about usage, how to enhance it, etc....
6. They ask the software writer or community for help in getting their needs met
7. As the magnitude of questions and requests increase, it becomes burdensome and "more-than-a-hobby"
8. The person or members of the community begin to charge small amounts for the software so that they can maintain their livelihoods while making support and development a full-time function
9. Big companies adopt the software
10. Big demands is created for people who can develop and support the software
11. The size of this demand creates paid-consultants and developers for the "free software"
12. The demand for more sophisticated developers and support people leads to industry being created around the new "formerly-free" software
13. The price falls into line with the first "pay-for" software
14. Go back to step #1

We've seen this cycle happen multiple times. The two most notable examples: Linux is through this cycle, Firefox is mid-way through this cycle. The outcome is that you end up in the longer-term with the sort of bait-and-switch that was mentioned with the "Band Named Free Beer" scenario earlier in this article.

At Cheetah, we know that software is not truly free. Even if it's created to be free, the longer-term support and product development demands can only prevent it from being free. To that, we do our very best to keep our operating costs low and deliver a very good product (SmartCAT, TurboCAT for Windows) at a very good value. Did you know that we've not increased prices in 20 years since the Cheetah Systems was founded in 1987?

By maintaining our discipline and continually looking at ways to innovate and keep costs low while improving our tech support, training, testing and product development processes, we are able to ensure that we will be a stable supplier for top-notch CAT software and have brilliantly knowledgeable, friendly people here for you for a good long time.

All the best,

Greg L. Richardson
VP of Operations & Director of Marketing
Cheetah International, Inc.

Cheetah and the NCRA Mid-Year Convention

Cheetah will not be attending the upcoming NCRA Mid-Year Convention and we will continue to advertise periodically in the JCR.

We have thought hard about our marketing and advertising decisions over the past half decade. We have also received some comments and observations from people that, by not attending or by advertising sporadically, that the industry might not be aware that we are in business.

We acknowledge that those speculations may be right and we could possibly be making a mistake by not being present at the mid-year NCRA event and in the national Journal of Court Reporting magazine.

We decided that we would try something different a few years ago after our conversations with some customers, reviewing what the previous owners/managers had done and surveying the changes in the media world.

Most of our customers had started to search for us on the internet – not in the JCR.

We heard a significant number of customers tell us they did not go the mid-year or annual NCRA shows, they like their state reporter association meetings better.

We also started to feel that advertising was a bit more ‘big company’ than we really wanted to be.

So we thought we would try an experiment for a while. We have spent our time and money contacting all of our customers via phone and taken great care in hiring really talented people to working in customer service and technical support. We have also spent more time working on our website and providing user forums.

Our customers have helped us understand that it is better to be small and personal, and better to have our solid technical support available 7x24x365 than to spend money advertising in a magazine that reaches only about a third of court reporters and attending an annual event that is attended by only about 5% of court reporters.

How has this been working? So far, the results look positive – we are able to incorporate more in to the products and services we offer because we talk to more customers and we are getting more referrals from customers using the new software.

We are getting out to more local state reporter events and advertising in their newsletters. Of course, we would love to be in all these places. That does take time, effort and money – we are trying to be good custodians of the funds our customers send us. This, to us anyway, means product and support first through personal contact, then advertising.

I hope this answers any concerns about our decisions to not be in the JCR and at the Mid-Year convention. I am pretty sure that we will be at the annual event this year, as we have been at them since 2000.

Again, thank you to everyone for your concern and input. If there is anything that we can do to help, please let us know.

Regards,

Don Miller
President/CEO
Cheetah International, Inc.

It's Out!!!

We're all extremely excited here at Cheetah for the Release of SmartCAT version 2.4. This has been a real triumph in that we have been able to incorporate a TON of new functionality as well as improvements to the old.

Also, there's a new CATChat up. You can find it here.

All the best,

- Greg L. Richardson
VP of Operations & Director of Marketing