I have been thinking about Bolt and what it will offer. And while I'm keen on the idea of an official ColdFusion IDE, I was wondering why Adobe are doing this and why now.
I will almost certainly adopt Bolt, not just me but our team here where I work. But it will come down to one thing, price!
If they charge for Bolt, which I think they will, it had better be worth it, after all I currently use CFEclipse on Flex Builder, and that works fine, so what are the benefits for the dollars.
One line of thinking is that ColdFusion might change the pricing model, charge for the IDE so that the server can be less expensive or free. This appeals to me if they do this, I prefer this model, it is somehow easier to spend $X hundred dollars for each developer rather than X thousands of dollars for each server.
If Adobe decide to keep ColdFusion pricing as is and still charge for Bolt, then I think they have misread the market. Given cost cuts in business and the competitors having free offereings, Adobe need to make some brave moves on pricing, and they need to make them now.
4 comments:
Your line of thought makes sense. Adobe need to do something to respond to the competition and the changing market. I wonder if Bolt will only "plug in" with CF or if Adobe are after the entire CFML developer market? It would make good business sense for it to fully support (Open)BD and Railo too, so if Adobe lose out on a sale of CF they can still flog the lost customer their shiney new IDE.
I'm not on the Bolt beta program so I have no idea how good it is, but it needs to be fairly good to take people away from CFEclipse and Dreamweaver; both being satisfactory products. (I'm deliberately leaving some scope here to be wowed by Bolt!)
I agree and IDE that supported all major CFML engine would be nice but I don't think that will be Bolt. Railo and OpenBD are going to have much more rapid release cycles - I doubt Adobe could keep the language support for those current.
I'd still love to see someone take up CFEclipse and make it the ultimate CFML editor. Since it's open source each CFML engine author could easily provide plugins for their respective engines (either for free or at a cost).
The only problem with charging for an optional IDE to offset the cost of a piece of server software is that not everyone will pick up the tab. There will be a lot of people that aren't going to jump on Bolt. On top of that they still need to recover the investment on the initial development of Bolt, support, sales, and maintenance. The only thing I want in Bolt is a solid IDE (features can always be added) that is reasonably priced (ie. not Dreamweaver). Just my 2cents.
I have tried Bolt on the beta program and can't help but feel extremely underwhelmed by it. Why is it that each new editor they produce seems to be less intuitive and have fewer features than ColdFusion Studio did... why on earth did they not just build upon that?
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