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Internet Brand’s Investment Nightmare: vBulletin
28 Comments | Posted by Veritas in Commentary, Internet Brands, Jelsoft, vBulletin
When dealing with any investment, there is risk. Does Internet Brands understand how much risk they've undertaken? Is Internet Brands those managing risks well?
I’ve often wondered why some the senior development team for vBulletin suddenly left without any advance warning. In one short month, Kier Darby, Mike Sullivan, and Scott Macvicar all left Internet Brands. In that one month, it represented a significant loss of talent, senior management, and senior development of vBulletin. These three represent the brains of vBulletin. They represent the integrity of vBulletin. They represent the key development and leadership of a industry icon. They understood customer’s requirements. They understood the customer. Last but not least, this trio understood vBulletin.
These questions have been racing in my mind. Why did they leave? What possible reasons could they have left? Was it because Internet Brands (Nasdaq: INET) acquired them? Was it because of management? Was it because they no longer liked working at Jelsoft and Internet Brands? Was it because they became merely a cog in this giant machine? Or maybe rather than job enlargement and enrichment, they experienced job reduction and dissatisfaction?
Finally, that silence has been broken. It appears what we’ve suspected all along happened. I hoped this wasn’t the case, however, my own nightmare, suspicions, and fears have been confirmed.
Internet Brands meddled where they should not have. They’ve roasted, and killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It is the classic management case study in which employees leave because of management, not because of the company.
Due to poor oversight on management’s part, it’s now lead to a disaster of a product. Software bugs are at an all time high. Customer dissatisfaction is on the rise. The investment to acquire Jelsoft was made to boast Internet Brand’s portfolio. Now it’s clear that with poor oversight on management’s part, they’ve created a significant number of issues that they were not originally facing. It’s looking more and more like it was a poor investment. Thousands of hours are being thrown into manpower. Resources are being allocated towards trying to correct what was originally not broken.
Looking at this entire debacle as an external auditor, I would put in an audit report with senior management and investors that due to current management’s mishandling of this situation, and the lack of oversight on management’s part, this poses a risk to the company. This is risk that needs to be addressed and managed promptly. Controls that should be in place to manage these risks are completely inadequate, if not non-existent.
If you don’t believe me, read Scott’s recent blog entry for why he left. Assuming he doesn’t mind a reposting, here it is:
This post is part one of a few to be published over the next coming days about my current funemployment, the best place to start is the leaving from my previous employer.
I’ve a small script that I run locally to show me how many days it’s been since I left Jelsoft Enterprises (171 at posting), the reason for which I’ve more or less kept very quiet about. A tweet did recently appear in an article on The Register, oops!
A significant amount of time has passed and I’m now comfortable commenting on this without sounding terribly bitter about the whole thing.
In the summer of 2007, Internet Brands (carsdirect.com) purchased Jelsoft the company behind vBulletin. Nothing changed internally and the engineering team had very little direct contact with our now parent company, this remained for around a year. Jump forward to summer 2008 and a few members of the team were summoned to LA to give a presentation about the future of vBulletin 4.0 and the big re-write that was planned. Most of the progress since finishing 3.8 had been design plans and research. We had looked over the old product for current features and design issues, analysed customer feedback on missing features and checked the bug tracker for common issues. The end result was that the 4.0 re-write was cancelled.
A new project / general manager was installed based out of LA (development was in England) and scrum was the shiny new model that would allow us to refactor the current release of vBulletin (3.8) and have a new version chock full of features in a meager six months. I’m not going to comment too much on why there were problems, but lets just say that it didn’t quite work out that way and we’re now at 14 months and the beta process is just underway.
With creative control of the project moved to LA and out of the hands of the team that had been overseeing it for the past six years it was hard not to feel like a simple code monkey. I was no longer passionate about the product and had been that way for months. This accompanied by the change in direction of the product and priorities of the company resulted in my resignation in May just before php|tek. My final day at Jelsoft was June 19th 2009.
Since the other UK-based senior developers and I left the code quality has dropped somewhat, there are over 1000 open bugs filed, on a normal day this time last year it would be around 10. Internet Brands have also increased prices, changed the licensing model and shelved the project tools product. A lot has changed in a short period of time and I’m not sure if it was for the best.
While Scott wrote one perspective from behind the scenes, much what he has presented has merit as we have seen the end-results of those decisions. Risks are not being managed.
With any audit findings, I’d leave recommendations. Here are my recommendations.
- Get Kier back. Get Scott back. Get Mike back. Do what it takes to get them back on the team and back in control of this entire mess. They need to be placed at the forefront of this project and development should be placed back in their hands.
- Implement policies to ensure proper communications happen between customers and Internet Brands. Customers can not afford to be uncertain. With uncertainty comes doubt. With doubt comes more second thoughts on purchases. With hesitation and second thoughts on purchases, comes lack of sales.
- Internet Brand’s Human Resources needs to implement policies to ensure employees do not feel their opinions are not welcomed, nor that their jobs are being reduced. Especially in scenarios in which companies are acquired, they need to train management on how to properly incorporate outside corporate cultures with their own. With all the creative controls taken from existing developers, it’s clear that could feel they no longer have control over a product they’ve spent several years working with a labor of love, and care.
- New policies should be created on how creative control should be handled. With such a mature and competitive product vBulletin was, it was clear that this product would complement the Internet Brand’s portfolio. Clearly it should have completely complement and increase the value of Internet Brand’s however due to poor oversight on incorporating vBulletin into Internet Brand’s portfolio and the lack of understanding of vBulletin customers, we’re seeing backlash at all levels, and not just customers.
- Implement a proper open forum regarding customer policies. Clearly this pricing structure is flawed. Clearly this transition has been completely rough and mishandled. It does not favor existing customers. As the classic business saying goes, 90% of all sales comes from 10% of your customer base. Especially from a flagship and industry respected product, vBulletin’s growth was purely from word of mouth advertising. There was hardly any advertising done that significantly increased vBulletin’s market share. Furthermore, allow a period of time in which customers can comment on certain policies. Rather than denying certain policies are being implemented, garner feedback. This way both Internet Brands and customer will be satisfied. Clearly the risks of implementing new policies from senior staff were not acknowledged and ignored. To ignore such risks is unacceptable. These risks needed to be understood, addressed and managed, but clearly it was not. They clearly did not anticipate the backlash from customers.
- Good will. I can not stress enough good will enough. It was good will from the old management team from vBulletin that newer price structures came to be without much protest. It was good will that allowed the older management team to progress things at a pace we knew things would be done well. It’s clear that good will is out the door. Internet Brands needs to issue apologies to all customers. It will be tough to admit to customers, and especially shareholders that they’ve completely mishandled the situation. It will, however, generate, a step towards resolution and hopefully appease customers. Next would be to upgrade all vBulletin 3 customer’s licenses to vBulletin 4 Forum. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, however, it needs to be done. Clearly things were not communicated properly to customers, and now things needs to be corrected.
- New policies and controls are needs to be implemented on how to handle acquired projects. It’s easy to say use a waterfall or prototype approach in development. It’s also easy to say use SCRUM as an approach towards development. However, management needs to look at existing projects and see if it’s remotely possible to implement such a development approach. Clearly this backfired on Internet Brands as they attempted to implement a development method without completely understanding and managing the risks of implementing such a new development model.
- New policies also needs to be implemented to ensure customer requirement’s are met. Thus far, the feedback for the Content Management System (CMS) has been lackluster at best. The CMS has been filled with bugs, disappointment, and poor implementation. If customers requirements are not met, then customers will not use the product. It is simple as that.
Clearly there’s lots to work on. Internet Brands has inadequate controls and policies to handle the growth and risks. Due to lack of controls, it has tarnished a product respected and considered to be an industry standard. There is hope. vBulletin is at an important crossing point. The next set of decisions will ultimately determine whether vBulletin will fall by the wayside, forgotten, or reclaim it’s position as an industry standard. It starts by valuing your senior developers who have been working with a product far longer than you ever have. It starts by working with customers once more in creating an award-winning, industry respected product.
vBulletin could clearly be a significant source of income and profit, but only if Internet Brands starts understanding their customers and starts managing risks.
28 Comments for Internet Brand’s Investment Nightmare: vBulletin
hotwheels | December 9, 2009 at 8:58 am
Bob | December 9, 2009 at 5:40 pm
It’s a huge assumption that Kier, Scott or Mike would even want to go back after what has happened.
Also to say “They represent *everything*” that is vBulletin is someone naive, a significant majority for sure, everything, no.
Jim | December 9, 2009 at 6:11 pm
I have been trying for over a month or more to get IB to give me the name and address of their legal representative in the UK in order to resolve the breach of the Consumer and Trading Standards law. TO date via the ticket system, email and direct email to IB HQ, the cowards will not provide this information. vB3 licence is under UK jurisdiction and I want my day in court.
mr-gtb | December 10, 2009 at 12:40 am
Honestly, I think the people that left, did so because IB made the decision to move everything over to America from the UK. If you take note, most of the developers that have left were all UK based mainly from what I’ve seen. Or none of them lived in the states.
Veritas | December 10, 2009 at 2:39 am
Consider other possibilities, mr-gtb. Consider IB moved development from the UK to America as a result of Kier, Scott and Mike leaving. Or the possibility it was a side-effect of having a general manager stationed in Los Angeles.
Either way, most other reasons do not show IB in the most positive light.
Kier | December 10, 2009 at 3:44 am
MRGTB – vBulletin development had operated without a geographical base from its inception through to the point at which the office in Pangbourne was obtained in 2006, so while the decision to hire new developers in LA, rather than bringing additional talent to the UK office was unwelcome and unhelpful, that in itself would not have been sufficient to convince three developers – with approaching three decades of commitment to vBulletin between them – to resign from the jobs they had loved.
Let’s also not forget that Darren Gordon is still a UK employee of Jelsoft, which made Bob Brisco’s comment about completing the move of development from UK to LA rather odd.
As Scott hinted in his blog, there were numerous factors behind our individual decisions to quit, not least of which would be the effective scrapping of the vBulletin 4 project as it had been envisaged and planned for the previous several years, the colossal drain of decision-making power away from me and my team and the fundamental shift in development priorities that came under Internet Brands’ management.
Veritas | December 10, 2009 at 4:50 am
@Bob – I didn’t say they represent everything that is vBulletin. The point was they understood the customer, they understood the product and market.
Thanks for reading.
Niccolo | December 10, 2009 at 11:26 am
This is definitely very disconcerting, but I am very glad that former vBulletin devs are now stepping forward and indicting the company that took over. I am one of those big board owners who is holding off and taking a wait-and-see approach. We have invested so much into vBulletin and have millions of posts and thousands of users who rely upon our websites and communities that simply upgrading to vBulletin 4 is not feasible without seeing how the product ends up.
There are several things that have given me pause, chief of which is how Internet Brands has mishandled the customer revolt. That vBulletin 4 is turning out to be a product riddled with bugs and inefficiencies does not surprise me, but that Internet Brands has seemingly not handled the situation thus far professionally and that the new General Manager quit just months into his job, suggests that it’s a spiraling ship gone out of control.
Floris Fiedeldij Dop | December 10, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Despite parting the team in January for other reasons, the decision to not return was fueled by the way things were handled, together with me not agreeing to the development path and direction the vBulletin product was taking. The license changes and staff leaving on top of that made me realize the product isn’t the same anymore, nor what I want out of it.
I’ve been on the team and helped during European business hours and due to my bad eyes also during nightly hours if the daylight didn’t allow it. Heck, because I was a fanboy and enjoyed helping with version 3 with a passion, I helped during weekends, when the ticket list was too long, did additional tasks, helped during holidays up to the early morning hours of January 1st.
But I do not see in version 4 of vBulletin right now what I was hoping it would be. And while I am certain it won’t be a flop in sales, I do feel it’s reputation took a hit. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a web site like this, an article in theregister.co.uk and a forum with archived threads on vBulletin.com.
The reason I am saying this is because I am still a customer and version 4 still affects me. Do I upgrade? Do I take the risk? Do I continue investing money into upgrades and new licenses? Do I keep posting on the forums to help others? Do I continue my vBulletin Fans Network? Do I keep providing services through my site to help others? Do I deal with the stress from seeing decisions being made that I don’t agree to sometimes? Do I continue to compliment the developers in private when I see improvements?
I guess to answer these questions for myself and everybody else, I have posted simple and fair questions on their forums to learn and understand the changes and my options as a customer. And to sum it up after careful thinking: No. I have a network on wetalknation.net with 10+ communities below it. And it will remain on 3.8. And from January 1st 2010 I will leave my 37,000+ posts and events from 2009 on the vBulletin.com community behind me and use my energy to focus on other things.
Good luck everybody with your communities.
mr-gtb | December 11, 2009 at 12:52 am
@Kier
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Internet Brands have made is look as though they’ve planned all along from day one to move everything from the UK over to USA for some reason. So while vBulletin may not have had a geographical base at first while you worked for Jelsoft. After Internet Brands took over that started to change it seems.
Off course there have been rumours (which TECK posted himself), that they offered him a job, but wanted him to move location to the USA to suit them. Although, Ray Morgan later denied this happened!
So it makes you wonder if Internet Brands “maybe” looked at all the UK based staff and had plans to drop most of them because of the way they was heading in wanting to move it all over to the states from the UK.
I’m not saying that’s why you left, I’m just saying in the bigger picture of things you can be forgiven for seeing it maybe looking a little that way.
mr-gtb | December 11, 2009 at 12:59 am
And no offence Kier, but what better way to get rid of UK based staff they want to try and off-load. Than to try and give them a reason to quick themselves. That saves them having to pay all sorts of extra money to you like “redundancy” – if they can get YOU to quit voluntary instead.
Niccolo | December 12, 2009 at 1:45 pm
@Floris,
I admire your courage to make this decision. I know a lot of us Big Board owners are looking at the major leaders of the vBulletin user community for guidance on what is next. In particular, we have been looking at people like you, The Geek, Calorie, etc. — the mod developers who made vBulletin the product that it was.
What alternatives are you considering? Do you simply let your communities languish on 3.8.x technology? Or are you looking at a migration towards another platform? What platforms are you evaluating?
For our part, we’ve taken a look at IP.Board, and believe it is the closest competitor to vBulletin, but its features and functionality veer far away from the level of simplistic Enterprise performance we desire. MyBB, which has long been rumored (but denied on both ends) to be a vBulletin split, seems closer to the 3.5.x spirit than the 3.7 and 4.0 splits in development. Nevertheless, neither IP.Board nor MyBB have anywhere near the development community that vBulletin has, and this is much to its detriment: whereas vBulletin has thousands of modifications over two sub-versions (3.7 and 3.8 respectively), IP and MyBB only have dozens in their entire catalogues. This does not inspire confidence in these products’ ability to customize and extend their features and functionality.
One general consensus is beginning to emerge, though: after hearing from Scott, Kier, and others, and looking at the Bug Tracker — where thousands of bugs remain unaddressed and even unconfirmed — vBulletin’s better days seem to be behind it.
Floris Fiedeldij Dop | December 12, 2009 at 7:02 pm
@ Niccolo
Competition? At the moment vBulletin has no competition if you ask me. It’s why it’s the leader in the bbs market. vBulletin version 3 has always been the best in the book in my observation, experience and personal and professional opinion. IPS has made great progress optimizing their code but they’re still not worth it for me to consider to convert to. Especially if you are a big-boards owner (which I am not claiming I am btw).
When people ask me will I convert from vBulletin 3.8 to IPB 3.x I reply: Why would I want to downgrade?
The future of my sites depends on the reputation of the vBulletin 3 code, if it lives up to its name, and I think it will. And it depends on the community around vBulletin; the fan base, the vBulletin.org coders, and such, to make it live on. Just how it did with version 2 of vBulletin. Don’t forget, a good potion of big board owners still run vBulletin version 2 because it simply works for them. At the end of the day it’s about content and the community on the site.
And if in a year, two years, or four years from now a worthy competitor to version 3 comes out, be it vBulletin version 6 or IPB version 5 or phpBB version 6 or we will reconsider sticking with version 3 if it is in the best interest of the web site.
Once InternetBrands suddenly forced me within two weeks to reconsider the future of my web site I had to go through the list of options. From upgrading from not 10x $40 but 10x $130 (and after sale period for 10x $250! and then again for version 5 if prices don’t go up again). To downgrading to competitor software. Or even deciding to close the sites since it will become too costly and time consuming. After asking some questions I decided to not invest any further in the site, but not shut it down either. And live on the 3.x core code base and tweak the site further to get the most out of it for the end user browsing it.
Tweet Digest for 2009-12-13 | MrFloris | December 13, 2009 at 3:03 pm
[...] – oink, what a read: http://vbtruth.com/internet-brands-investment-nightmare-vbulletin/155/ drama soap continues (or does it) [...]
BJ | December 15, 2009 at 4:01 pm
It’s amazing what kind of petty whining the Internet can generate.
I’m a very satisfied customer. But from what I have seen, the people complaining are the people who have been complaining for years about features left undeveloped. Now that features are being developed, they’re complaining that they have to pay for them.
4.0 Suite is vastly more fully featured than 3.x, and, frankly, when you make features, you get bugs. So there are more bugs than there previously were–DUH! That’s not a sign of bad management or development. That’s a sign of actual progress being made to finally give the customers what they want.
I find it absolutely ridiculous that people are so actively trying to hurt a company that is trying to serve its customers in a way that the previous senior development team failed to do.
Veritas | December 17, 2009 at 3:25 am
@BJ – I don’t believe it’s fair to paint all of us with the same paintbrush. Granted there are a good number of people who have complained and/or voiced concerns in the past about features being undeveloped. However, look at the vast majority of complaints. It’s mainly people unhappy at how things have been going. If you want a few clear examples of poor management, take a look at these examples:
Example A) when the “leak” happened, all Internet Brands and former general manager Ray Morgan did was refuse to comment, and even to a point, deny that those were the final plans. Fast forward to present day, and nothing has changed. Everything posted in the leak can be validated as fact.
Example B) currently if you split off comments from the vBulletin Suite, and tinker with them, only to remerge them later, the entire system collapses. I believe there is an entire thread dedicated to this “misuse” case as we’d call it in audit. Ultimately this misuse case generates a huge bug and flaw. From an external auditor’s perspective, management is pressing the developers to do a release. Rather than taking the time to fix it, it’s being rushed out. Instead of a more stable product, we’re getting a more bugged filled product.
I honestly don’t see much new within the forums. The CMS, attachment manager, widgets, are all on top of existing 3.8.x code. If anything, those things should be rock solid instead of their current state. 14 months and this is what we have right? Yes there’s bugs in any major development. When I audit projects, I see them all the time. However 14 months later and this magnitude of bugs and flaws floating around, it certainly makes one wonder who’s managing the risks and scope of the project.
Finally, I think it’s absurd to conclude that people are actively trying to hurt Internet Brands. If people hurt Internet Brands, they may go out of business. If they go out of business, we don’t have a forum/cms provider. It is completely illogical.
HydraulicJack | December 17, 2009 at 5:13 am
I think any of you former employees and any of you site owners with the resources should consider putting together a consortium and making an offer to IB to take vB off their hands so they can get back to the business that they know and has made them rich.
Start low. You might be surprised.
These guys are looking more and more like they might be in over their heads, imho, or at the least, that their Cost-Benefit Ratio on this product may not be as hoped and they should reconsolidate and go do what they know how to do.
My 2 cents.
Niccolo | December 17, 2009 at 9:07 am
@BJ – I think you’re being unreasonable.
Look, many of us are long-time vBulletin customers who have been around since the Version 2 series. What we are deeply concerned with is the mismanagement. This site serves a critical function in centralizing the dissenting views — something that Internet Brands has squelched even among its own private licensed customer forums. It has also helped shed light on a few things.
1. The disastrous vB CMS which produces hundreds of queries per page-load. If you need details, there are several threads about this in the vB4 Beta forum, and Internet Brands has done nothing to correct this problem.
2. The high number of bugs; Scott MacVicar has stated that during typical development, there would be around ten (10) unresolved bugs. Check the vB4 Bug Tracker. There are thousands of unconfirmed, unassigned, and unaddressed bugs in a *RELEASE CANDIDATE*. Are you serious??!
vBTruth may have a great deal of nonsense and drama. But I think it speaks more about the lack of transparency, the dishonest management approach of the new vBulletin owners, and the shoddy depreciation in coding quality that has transpired for the vB4 rebuild.
TT | December 17, 2009 at 2:37 pm
@Floris,
I was thinking the same about IPB but i analyzed it a lot recently and i can say it that ipb3.x wouldnt not be a downgrade. But, i’d like to add that if Kier create another forum software i would buy it without thinking any second. Kier? Do you have any plans?
Niccolo | December 18, 2009 at 10:49 am
@Veritas – In all fairness, a lot of what is posted on vBTruth — while useful — is sensationalized using hyperbolic language that makes it difficult for Enterprise users to view this site with much credence other than believing that it’s run by a bunch of disgruntled banned users who have teamed up with disgruntled former employees.
That said, I raised this as a contrast to the actual value of having a place like vBTruth is. There needs to be a place where dissenting views can be exchanged and discussed freely, especially following Internet Brands’ decision to silence customer views on their forums. vBTruth does this very well, and if it only lays off the hyperbole and angst-drama, it can be a bit less ranty and a bit more professional.
Veritas | December 18, 2009 at 4:01 pm
@Niccolo
I can see your point of view. I apologize if my use of language appears sensationalized; it’s one of the biggest flaws of the internet and it’s the inability to hear the voice of the speaker. My intentions were to put the unedited truth out there, and yes while harsh at points, it’s what I would put as an auditor for any company I audit. I’ll present the findings regardless of how wonderful or how flawed the results are to all levels, including upper management (though I’ll probably politely sugar-coat it not to embarrass management)
But lastly, our choice of language is to help all parties understand this situation. Our site is not intended to cater to just enterprise users. It’s meant to be read by all stakeholders. It’s intended to be read by vBulletin license holders (personal and corporate), by upper management, by internal auditors, external auditors, INET Shareholders, INET Investors, and future vBulletin customers.
It’s an extremely broad audience and we’re trying to help everyone understand our plight.
Valachi | December 18, 2009 at 9:09 pm
POST FROM VB FORUMS!
————————–
vBulletin 4 – Disappointed!
Okay, so why did I have to pay 160 USD + 175 USD for vBulletin 4.0 Forum?
I decided to upgrade to vBulletin 4.0 Forum and I thought, yeah, just another 70 dollars.
When I looked and thought only a 15 dollar discount, I was shocked. I immediately believed in all the Indigo and 2012 phenomoen, it was that shocking.
So let me get this straight:
I had to pay 160 USD + 175 USD for vBulletin 4.0.
and new customers only have to pay 195 USD.
Can I please talk to the person who is in charge of mathematics? I’m sorry, I think I missed something, if anything it should be like this:
vBulletin Existing Customer (which costs 160 dollars) -> 15 dollars to get vBulletin 4.0
*complains about this on my popular blog*
———————————-
response:
STEVE MACHOL
Posts arguing about company policies are not allowed. You can fill out a support ticket if you have issue with company policies.
Nexus One Forum | December 21, 2009 at 1:08 pm
I’m very hesitant to install vb4 on any of my sites due to the bugs present. Will they get them fixed? Possibly. However, based on the current track record of open issues I won’t hold my breath.
Michael | December 21, 2009 at 5:21 pm
IPB is a serious contender. Have you actually tried out the software Floris? I gave up on VB because the support and managers act very stupid. IPB has quite a lot of features IMO. IPB rocks and a lot of people have went to IPB thanks to VB.
DB | December 23, 2009 at 6:56 am
An excellent comment from a customer:
[QUOTE]
Selective tendering – no more vB for the small forum-masters
I have been pondering for days about voicing my opinion and thoughts about the current situation, which became obvious last Wednesday. I’ve honestly speaking spent 4-5 hours just reading threads here, so I’m aware of the reaction there’s been from many others. Rather than bitching about how Internet Brands is unfair, I’ve chosen to sum up what I think is behind their latest move and what has been the trend ever since the company takeover. It pretty much also represents what I feel about things now.
Let’s for a moment think what Internet Brands is. It’s a NASDAQ listed public company, which has a plethora of investors backing it up with loans and share stakes. They are faceless entities with little real interest for how their end-users are treated, as long as the company performs as they expect and it’s giving dividends. It’s the #1 priority of IB to ensure that their investors are pleased. Now taken how they run a substantial number of community websites, it becomes in the company’s interest to minimize license expenses. Not to mention that buying up a software vendor makes it possible to fully absorb their know-how, intellectual property (hereafter IP), as well as making the decisions regarding how the product is developed.
A good comparison can be made to Microsoft. They have grown very much due to their numerous company takeovers, in which they have picked up existing smaller companies, with the IP they need. Rather than developing their own solutions, MS has repeatedly taken the easier path and bought existing development. That’s what we see happening here too. For IB it’s “good business” to takeover their primary software supplier, as that gives them total control of the product that is vital for their core business.
This is where we come to the keyphrase in my thread title – selective tendering. I know that Ray Morgan or some other head honcho will soon be here touting that I’m wrong and that IB is seriously keen to develop vB as a product for a larger audience. In fact it’s not something IB would have to do. They already have a large userbase of their own, even if they wouldn’t wish to market it to the broader general audience.
Now that the vBulletin business operations are no longer about making a product that sells as much possible (like it used to be with good ol’ Jelsoft), but rather maintaining the software platform used by their own large community network, they can do selective tendering. That is precisely what we are seeing here with the dramatic change of how the software is licensed. They don’t have to cater for the little forum-master anymore. As long as they have substantial in-house use for the product, they can choose to serve better paying customers. They no longer have to keep every single client, no matter how many years they’ve been using vBulletin and paid duely their 40 or 60$ a year. That’s also what the beancounters have been doing – calculating how many customers they can drop without making a too big losses.
Essentially vBulletin Solutions no longer needs or wants to serve the small forum-master, because just like the principles of selective tendering teach us, it’s often more profitable to focus on what is bringing you more profit per customer served. When I have been digging through all these threads, the attitude of Sitepoint’s webmaster represents precisely what I’m talking about. He has been basically touting “vBulletin only for the serious forum owners.” Yeah, vBulletin only for the ones that have a steady stream of cash from running their forums… On a sidenote: that’s just like IB. They have steady income from their own community network.
The key here is that sites that actually make a profit with their vBullletin based forums, can be milked for more licensing income, as they are in a better position to pay for price increases and changes of licensing scheme. Furthermore a forum with the modus operandi of a dead serious business, which should actually even give a living to someone, can more easily justify making investments. This is where I feel the strategy of IB is having its biggest shortcoming.
Selective tendering can be all nice and dandy, but it fails to pick up emerging communities, which still can’t use a lot of cash to software licenses, as probably most of the budget is going to hosting alone. Emerging communities are the best business potential for any forum software vendor, as they have potential and once they’ve made the breakthrough, it’s harder to switch from one platform to another. This is exactly what we have seen happening now. Even large forums consider making a switch to e.g. IPB, even if it would be a dreadful task due to custom coding and the sheer amount of data. These emerging communities feel being dumped by IB and look for other alternatives, as selective tendering is making it impossible for them to continue licensing vBulletin.
I myself spent this weekend converting one of my forums from vBulletin to SMF, simply because it would no more be viable to license vB for that project. And I still don’t feel it was a forum not worthy enough for using vB, rather the expense was becoming too paramount. I do see why users like Sitepoint’s webmaster like the whole idea of getting rid of “less serious” (if his analogy was that only “serious” forums are worthy enough). It’s just not smart in the long run, because the step to license a copy of vBulletin becomes very high and thus gives competing products the edge.
I’m currently amused (or maybe more like bemused, if I’d be IB?) that I have several expired owned licenses, which are 5-6 years old, but I can’t currently even get them active again and license just the standalone vBulletin Forum. I was actually about to reactivate one of them, but realised that the shopping cart only gives me the choice to pay 210$, even if I just want to download 3.8.4 PL1. That was enough for me. Spent then the weekend doing that troublesome SMF conversion, as my business was apparently not in IB’s interest.
All in all, looking back at how the team roster has been reshuffled during the past year (Kier, Ashley, Floris…) and how the tone of communication from the head honchos to the community has changed, it becomes obvious that IB has set a new course, which doesn’t anymore involve us, the little forum-masters. I’m not going to speculate why the team has been reshuffled. I do however point out that it’s in IB’s interest to have men of their own in control, to make sure the product is developed as they wish.
Just like I promised, I haven’t ranted or used arbitary language. I just felt that I have to speak out how I see the reasons which lead to this and what I feel about it. Sure, nothing of course changes, because selective tendering rules out any clients like me, but at least I hope someone else will also give a second thought about giving one more dime to IB.
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above attributed to Rasbelin
Vildat | December 28, 2009 at 9:21 am
I think that vBulletin will soo start to offer forum hosting. They have teh infrastructure, financial backing and with all the bloated and high query features they’re adding, they will cause all sorts of problems for forums on shared hosts, so IB will once again “come to the rescue” by offering a hosted “as-much as you want queries” forum.
This way they will havce control of even more stats from forums and their license holders.
mrgtb | January 3, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Well, I can’t help but notice off late, just how inactive vBulletin.com has become compared to before. Sure, there are new faces joining who are posting some stuff there. But all the older customers who were very active before Internet Brands took over, or there just after. Have all but disappeared now and post more or less nothing on the forum forums anymore.
vBulletin is just such an awful looking product, the theme used is doing nothing to make it ever slightly resemble a professional product (and they either can’t see it, or just won’t accept it) because they know it will dramatically slow down development and lose them money sales in they change it now. I keep noticing they are making changes to the theme colours all the time to try and improve it, but they’re flogging a dead horse with that theme they use. They need to ditch it!
And then you look at the fact they released vBulletin 4 as Gold and we have over a 1,000 Bugs outstanding on it. It’s all just a bad joke really as customers expense.
That is a great article and i totally agree. Internet brands needs to rethink how they have treated and are treating customers. Without us, they aren’t a business. When i was banned from Vbulletin.com for speaking my mind, i was actually blown away by the move. It seems to me that steve machol was taking things way to personal at vbulletin.com. He seems to have forgotten that we are not just members of a forum, but we are customers to that site. I have never spent allot of time of that site, because it is a business site. When i found out about the changes that were coming after internet brands bought jelsoft, i showed up at vbulletin.com as an unhappy customer and spoke my mind. I did so in a section of the site that was supposed to be for licensed customers. After arguing with steve machol and wayne luke about their lying about the changes forthcoming, i found myself banned for life. Not only did they ban my username, they ip banned me. Sadly, i really like/liked Vbulletin software and am at a loss on what they are doing over there. Instead of lying to people, they should of been straight up. Apparently with all of the lying that i saw, was happening before i showed up to speak my mind. Hence, the loss of great talent within the company. Internet brand can fix this, but they have to take some serious steps. 1st) Get rid of ray morgan (he just resigned), get rid of the moderators that have the highest rate of customer bannings. Then reinstate all of those banned customers. 2nd) Open negotiations with the dev’s that left and get them back on the team. This can be done, but bob brisco needs to swallow his pride a little bit, admit he was wrong and move forward. 3rd) Relook at the licensing and try to move back to how jelsoft had the program set up. Customers would have had no problem paying a little more money every year for software upgrades, but to force them to buy an entire new license everytime there is a major software change, isn’t a great way to run a business that had become so successful.