Wow, 2011 flew by, right?  We put together this quick chart to summarize how the year ended, and the hard work everyone’s been doing to help increase search engine visibility for our customers.

2011 Wrapup: A Year in Numbers is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

In the past 6 months, Pear has nearly tripled revenue without any formal sales or marketing. We made buying Internet marketing services easy and affordable by bundling them together – much like how your cable company will bundle cable, phone and Internet. Nice, right? So we found marketers don’t really want to buy organic search, paid search and conversion optimization in 3 different places either.

Well, we think it’s a homerun, and we’re looking for a rockstar salesperson to help prime the pump even more. We’re looking for someone to create operational chaos. It’s a ground-level opportunity with a huge upside. We’ve also moved into this kick-ass office, so who wouldn’t want to work here?

In order to find this rockstar salesperson, we’re willing to pay a $10,000 bounty to anyone who sends us such an individual.

With the holidays right around the corner, who couldn’t use an extra few bucks in their pocket, right? It’s simple, and here’s how it works:

1. You send us an email to ALL the people you think would qualify, and who you will encourage to apply to the position. That way we know who referred who. Email your ideal candidates to rockstar@pearanalytics.com

2. Have the candidate fill out this form. We interview every candidate for the position. It’s a rigorous process….first me, then if they make it to the next level – a board member interview, and then if they pass Round 2, a third and final interview with another board member.

3. I’ll let each referrer know who’s dropped out of the race, and who’s still in it.

4. Once a final candidate is chosen and hired, the referrer (YOU) will get $2,000 immediately.

5. Once the rockstar salesperson sells their 5th deals (no matter what plan or price), you get another $3,000.

6. And finally, once the salesperson sells their 10th deal, you’ll get the final $5,000.

What are we looking for?

The ideal salesperson for Pear would have some sales experience, first of all. No need for 15 or 20 years, but a few would be nice. A person who has a “rolodex” of potential customers would certainly be helpful – this person is going to have to generate their own leads. Knowledge on the technology and things we sell is a plus, but most rockstar salespeople can sell without the intimate knowledge. This person would be very good on the phone, as our customers are in 6 countries and 3 continents. This person would need to come up with sales projections, as well as develop the sales model that we can use for future funding, if necessary. (i.e. every lead from channel X results in Y kind of thing). The downsides are: this can be a difficult product to sell; we have no sales process; we have little marketing materials; and we don’t have much of a marketing budget (gee, I’m starting to sound like the last half of a Viagra ad!). The upside is that you get to define the whole process and take all the credit for it!

What else are we offering?

The rockstar salesperson will get a base, plus commission, plus bonuses for going over target. The commissions are recurring, and are based on the plan purchased by the customer. We also have a competitive healthcare plan, unlimited vacation, ping-pong, and all the coffee you can drink.

Candidates, please fill out this form!

The $10,000 Giveaway for a Rockstar Salesperson is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

After using Chargify, the best recurring billing system on the market, for the last year, we’ve figured out a few workarounds to help you use the product even more.

Have one customer with multiple subscriptions?
We do, and the biggest complaint from the customer was that they couldn’t tell which statement referred to which subscription they had. When someone signs up using the Chargify hosted page, the Organization field always comes through as “None Given” (which the hosted page does not have a field for Organization). However, you can edit it later by clicking on the Subscriber in the Chargify interface and editing the Organization field.

Tip: even after editing the org field, if you try to create a new statement on the fly, it won’t work. You have to wait until the system generates a new statement at the next billing cycle and it will show up under the name.

Want to upgrade a customer, but their subscription expired?
We have a subscription that has a one-time fee and no recurring price, but figured out we set up the subscription wrong initially. At first, we set the plan to “expire” after 30 days, mainly because we didn’t want to inflate subscriber counts, so those counts could be reserved for monthly subscribers.

Well, if the customer wanted to upgrade after the plan expired, you would have to have them sign up all over again. Now, you have two options: 1) leave the subscription open so it doesn’t expire, so you can upgrade them at any time later on; or 2) if the subscription does expire, reactivate the subscription, then you should see the Upgrade/Downgrade option.

Tip: make sure you put all of your upgradeable subscriptions in the same Family. In the current Chargify configuration, you can’t upgrade a subscription in Family A to a subscription in Family B.

Should my subscription be set to renew in 30 days, or 1 month?
It’s actually a great question because as far as I can tell, the billing cycles in Chargify behave differently for either option. Let’s say it is January 31st and your subscription renewal is set to 30 days. The next bill should run on March 2nd. If you chose the monthly billing option, your next bill would run on February 28th.

Observation: we’ve observed that if a subscriber signs up on a 29th, 30th or 31st day of any given month, and you have the monthly option chosen, those subscription billing cycles will apparently move to the 28th of the month – probably to keep it consistent in months like February.

You have to appreciate all of the complexities that go into writing recurring billing software. If any reps at Chargify would like to add to (or correct) what I’ve written, please feel free!

Chargify Tips & Tricks is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

A new e-book full of fact published by Hubspot this morning shows the growing trend of B2B marketers who are shifting their marketing budgets to inbound, lead generation activities.  One of the growing activities is search engine optimization (SEO), as well as social media and virtual events/webinars.

Companies are realizing now that not only do they need less “interruption” ways to attract new customers (like SEO), but they also need to nurture them (like webinars).  Few consumers (businesses included) are ready to buy your product or service the minute they first meet you.  It’s kind of like dating – you don’t ask the girl to marry you on the first date, right?  We can probably thank Hubspot for paving the way for this trend over the last 5 years with their constant stream of useful materials for inbound marketing strategies and tactics.

On the decline were several “outbound” marketing efforts, including paid search (PPC), direct mail, trade shows and print advertising.  You can get a free copy of the Hubspot e-book here.

You can also sign up for the next webinar hosted by Pear Analytics where we will discuss some steadfast SEO tactics that work.

Marketers Shifting Budgets to Inbound Marketing is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

For a long time, we used WebsiteAlive, a chat client we chose about 18 months ago over LivePerson.  They were a startup, and so we thought we would support them and use the product.  I think we were paying around $40 or $50 a month for up to 3 operators, and they also had an iPhone app so we could take chats on the phone if we were at lunch or something.

But about a month ago, WebsiteAlive had made several changes to their code, and we began to experience problems.  Chats would drop right in the middle of the conversation, and we even noticed a drop in volume.  For some reason, we just weren’t getting as many chats anymore,  and chats are important to our lead flow.  People run their reports, or get to our products pages and having live chat helps us actually close more deals.

So we decided to try Olark, the makers of real-time chat and visitor monitoring services – for a second time.  About 5 or 6 months ago we tried Olark.  There wasn’t as much customization, but if I remember correctly, it was free, or close to it.  The problem back then was that Olark also dropped a lot of chats for whatever reason.

Second time was a charm.  We installed the code again, and having it up and running for less than five days has resulted in 23 chats that we weren’t getting previously with the other chat client, and one of these leads converted to a sale. We also configured it to pop up and invite the visitor to chat after a few minutes.

But the biggest difference that is likely the cause of the huge increase in leads is the fact that the Olark chat client “hovers” in the lower (or upper) corner of the page, your choice.  As the user scrolls up and down, the live chat box is always visible, but not obtrusive.  On our old chat client, once the user scrolled the page, the chat button was out of sight.

The other cool thing is that you configure Olark right into your existing chat client, like Jabber or Google Chat.  You can see exactly who is on the site, what page referred them, or keyword they found you with, and more.  And once the chat is over, you get an email and you can classify it as a lead or a sale.  I’m sure there are many more features we don’t even know about yet, but Olark is definitely making a positive impact on our lead flow.

Olark Significantly Increases Leads Through Chat is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

The following post outlines a very useful hack for KISS Insights that allows you to run a “multi-variate survey mode” where you can evenly rotate surveys, which is not currently available in their software.  With Pear being a “power user” of KISS Insights, they graciously helped us build this, and so we figured we would share it with the community.  Enjoy!

KISS Insights is a powerful page level survey tool that we started to use heavily to find out what people really wanted out of our software, as well as real-time direction from users as to what features we should build next.

But we needed more. We actually wanted a way to test pricing where we could evenly rotate a pricing question on the same page within the software – kind of like multi-variate testing. We wanted to know if users would pay $10, $20, $30, $49 or $99 per month for the service. By getting an equal amount of responses for each, we can use that data to come out of the gate with the most widely accepted price plan (if you’re wondering, as it turns out, it was NOT the $10 price point).

The limitation in KISS Insights was that we could only test one question at a time per page, which meant we would have to set one survey at one price, let it run until we had 30-40 results, and then go in and deactivate that survey, and activate a new one with a different price point. Not only was this kind of cumbersome in the UI, but it was going to take weeks, or even months to get an answer.

So internally, we figured that what we would do is hack KISS by creating 5 or 6 Insights accounts, and then using tracking cookies, assign each unique visitor a different code snippet from one of the accounts, and each KISS account would have a different pricing question.  Didn’t seem that hard to do, and logically, seemed like it would work.

So I contacted Hiten and asked him if he thought this was a good idea, and he actually responded with something much better.

In a few days, KISS actually developed some custom code for us that we could attach to our existing script to enable the multi-variate survey mode we were trying to create ourselves. All we had to do was create each survey, then get the survey ID and replace it in the additional code snippet:

_kiq.push(function(){
if(KI.location.matches(‘/free-seo-analysis(/.*)?’)) {
var surveys = [XXXX, XXXX]; // Replace with ID’s
var ab = new $KI.Cookie(‘ab_test_1′, surveys[Math.floor(Math.random() * surveys.length)]);
if(ab) {
KI.show_by_id(‘survey’, ab.get());
}
}
});

So our entire code snippet looks like this:

We found that the “if(KI.location.matches(‘/free-seo-analysis(/.*)?’)) {” line to be optional, and the snippet will work without it, although it does force a URL match, allowing you to use whatever URL’s when setting up the survey.  Now, the 5 surveys are rotating evenly each time the page is viewed, and I’m testing 5 different prices at the same time, allowing us to get an answer much faster.  And as I mentioned in the beginning, the answer was not the lowest price, but rather the mid-level price.

Thanks to Hiten and the KISS team for making this so easy!

KISS Insights Hack: How to Run Multiple Surveys on the Same Page is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

I’m going to show you how I concepted and built not one, but two recurring revenue products in one evening using Unbounce, Wufoo and Chargify – and I never wrote a single line of code.  And the results were unreal.

I am not a programmer.  I wish I was, but I took a different path after engineering school and went more into the marketing side.  My programmers are busy.  I can’t bother them, but I need revenue.  Do I get them off what they’re doing, or can I build something myself to test with some users?  There has to be a way….we get plenty of traffic, and somehow I’ve got to get the 1,500 people a week using our software, and the 10,000+ users in our mailing list to check this out.  I’ve got to do something without bothering engineering just yet….just till I can prove this works.

OK, here we go.  My first product is simply an SEO copywriting service that I just want to set up as a one-time fee for now.  $35 per article sounds good, and we’ll even write the tags you need (title, meta description, H1, etc.).  My second product is a link building service, and I want to get folks on a small, manageable plan, but one where we can keep working on month-to-month, chipping away and building good quality links the old-fashioned way – manually.  Both of these sound totally un-scalable and an absolute nightmare to execute.  But that’s OK because we’re engineers and we can figure out the process flow because that’s what we do…make things efficient.  (And I want to do a blog post later about Software AND a Service, versus Software AS a Service).  Why do I want to do this? Well, we learned from our software, and the 20,000+ websites we’ve run and the tons of customer feedback, that they need MORE than someone telling them their site sucks.  They want you to fix it.  I mean, you don’t go to a doctor and he tells you everything that’s wrong with you, and then send you on your way with a “good luck”, right?  There HAS to be something in adding a reasonable and reputable service to the software we have.  Yeah, it’s going to take some work internally, I mean this isn’t all “hands off” – but hey, it’s really no different than staffing up a bunch of support people anyway that most SaaS products are destined to have.

The first thing I did was log into my Unbounce account and set up my landing pages.  This beautiful interface lets me build landing pages in a snap without needing a single programmer.  The link building page took about 30 minutes longer because I had to spend a while playing with buttons, colors of the boxes, etc.  In the end, I thought it turned out OK.  You can see the SEO copywriting page here, and the link building page here.  Now you can see the modified page after tons of iterations, and lots of help from the guys at Unbounce

The second thing I went into my Wufoo online form builder account and created some info gathering forms in a jiffy.  Once a user clicks on the call-to-action button from the Unbounce landing page, they get dumped into the form and I ask them all of the info I need to know in order to start the job, right, so it’s like a “job request form”.  Easy.  Then I went back to the Unbounce landing pages and linked them all up to the various buttons, and I did send each unique landing page to a unique form, because depending on what they clicked on originally, I needed to send them to a specific Chargify page.

Now, enter Chargify, the leader in recurring billing for web 2.0 services.  These guys are really awesome, because they let me create all the products I want, and they only start charging me after I’ve hit 50 customers (regular charges from your merchant, like Authorize.net still apply).  So I created a product family for “SEO Copywriting” and one for “Link Building Services”, and under the link building services, I created three different products based on the three monthly plans we’re offering.  They let me easily create a Payment Page that all I have to do is link to from the Wufoo form after they hit “submit” on the form, and they’ll send them on over for payment.  Oh yeah, I also used a KISS Insight page level survey on each Unbounce landing page, so I could gauge weather I was full of shit or not.

The result? Well, after an email blast this morning and linking to these pages in our existing software (which I can also do myself), we got 600 leads in the first day, and $1,450 of recurring monthly revenue and $350 of one-time revenue since 11 am this morning.

I get a confirmation from Wufoo and Chargify when someone completes the forms, so then all we have to do is match them up afterward, and start working on the project.  Chargify takes care of the auto-billing for me, and now all I need to do is let people know we have the service now (a marketing function, not an engineering function).

As for rapid iteration, I’ve already created a new product in Chargify and a different Wufoo form for 4 SEO articles per month for $100, and for $150 we will install it on your WordPress blog for you, and already we’ve gotten some folks to sign up.  Took me 8 minutes to create the new product.

At the end of the day, I completely hacked all of this together, but I didn’t need to write code, and I didn’t need to bother a code writer.  I can test various products and pricing, and let the engineers focus on something else.  My next task is to make sure we can keep a high quality product, fast turnaround (some of the articles are already done), and scalability.  Who knows, next week we might try a few more products

Update 9/22/10 2:31p – I just set up Chargify to send a successful transaction to a “thank you” page I set up.  Turns out I got 3 chats today asking me “what should I expect”, so now they know   I also set up a B page in Unbounce for the copywriting service to sell a 4 articles for $100/mo plan.  30% better conversion rate on that one!

Update 9/23/10 4:58p – I just hacked together a very simple rating system, again, no code required.  Since we started sending articles back to folks, I wanted to see what they thought of it, so in the bottom of the email, we put “Please Rate this Article: Awesome! |  Good :/ |  Sucked ” which then takes them to a page I created on our WordPress blog which has more information about how to fix an article, have us re-write it, or even order more.  My thought was I can track unique pageviews to identify a trend or problem.  It’s probably not the most effective thing in the world, but it works for now.

Update 9/24/9:58a – Yesterday I used Unbounce to create a variant of my Link Building landing page, which was sucking wind.  For whatever reasons, people think link building is a “spammy” SEO tactic.  So I went in and created a new variant to try and address that, and BAM!  1,271% better conversion rate!!

How I Set Up and Sold a Product Using Unbounce, Wufoo and Chargify is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Pear Analytics is a web startup in San Antonio, Texas. We build search engine optimization tools and software to help make SEO accessible to everyone. We also have a handful of enterprise consulting projects, including PEER 1, ServerBeach and Voxeo. (We’re currently not accepting any new consulting projects – but thanks anyway!)

Ryan Kelly

Founder/CEO

Ryan started Pear in 2008 in search of doing some cool work in the analytics and SEO space, an area where he had been dabbling in for five years with other companies. Low and behold, his need to inherently “automate everything” resulted in a neat little website analyzer tool that ultimately landed some seed cash to see where he could take this thing,  and voila – Pear is now a software development firm.

Before all of this SEO business, Ryan used to have a real job at a big aerospace company designing and working on jet engines and stuff. Go figure. He even got a patent for his work, but that was just because he got lucky and was in the right place at the right time.

Ryan barely graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1998 where he majored in Mechanical Engineering, and minored in partying and basketball. He should have gone into the NBA at 6 foot-6, but instead decided to trade in the fame and fortune to be a geek and make a whole lot less money.

Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn
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Vid Luther

Partner, Lead Application Developer

Vid leads all application and tool development for Pear. He is an expert with system design and architecture (or so he says), and is responsible for load testing, high availability and security of all applications. Vid has been working on Linux systems since 1995, and has had the opportunity to work on, and design systems for companies like Double Click (acquired by Google), Rackspace, Network Solutions, Merck, and J.P. Morgan. Most recently, he implemented a mock trading game for J.P. Morgan on Facebook.

He loves bringing disparate systems together (not that we have any of those), and loves working with publicly available APIs (and hacking into non-public ones). Vid designed and implemented a unifying interface for Network Solutions, which allows them to manage their internet marketing, by having one interface talk to Yahoo!, MSN AdCenter, and Google. He is not only tech savvy, but also has business acumen, which helps ensure an eye on the bottom line. Vid was born in India, raised in New Delhi, and New Jersey, but moved to Texas in 2002, and has called it home since 2005 – and so that makes him our own Russell Peters.

Connect with Vid on LinkedIn
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Romy Misra

Senior Analyst

Romy is Pear’s senior analyst and mainly ensures that our 20+ algorithms in our tools are working like a well-oiled machine. But in general, Romy just eats a lot of chocolate. We had to get her a timed dispenser, typically used for cat food, to dispense the chocolate to her on the hour, every hour. Without chocolate, Romy sort of paces around the office aimlessly looking for things to do. She also brilliantly manages our client’s analytics, search engine optimization and shopping cart conversion projects.

Romy has a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University.

Connect with Romy on LinkedIn
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Alex Ford

Application Developer

Alex is our new developer from North Carolina, having been enticed away from his hometown by the smell of money. We suspect him of being part cyborg, given that he prefers interfacing with computers to people. He writes Perl code almost all day long, pausing infrequently to breathe.  His job is to grab the raw data and gently refine it into digestible morsels for Vid. We suspect that Alex plays video games online in his free time, but it is just as likely that he returns to his monastery hidden in the mountains.

Those ninjitsu classes he’s been taking are really paying off.

Megan Haley

SEO Coordinator

Megan is our SEO coordinator, which is essentially code for: we don’t really know WHAT she does. Currently the office’s reigning Galaga champion, Megan graduated with a BBA in Marketing (motto: “the least boring of the business majors!”) from St. Mary’s University in December 2009. Armed with Nerf guns, she mans an impenetrable corner of the office, handling product testing, bookkeeping, marketing and market research, and other furtive and top secret operations.

Paul Singh

Advisor, Board Member

Paul Singh is an expert in growing early stage startups — backed by some of Silicon Valley’s blue-chip investors (among their investments: Rambus, PayPal, and Google) — and established small businesses in a wide variety of industries. He has over 10 years of experience with a broad range of technologies, demonstrates a capacity for learning and adapting to new tools and languages in short time frames. He’s also like BFF with Dave McClure and some other hot shots in the SFO.

Among Paul’s hands-on experience are his due diligence analysis, business process analysis, process and system design, development, monitoring and ongoing support, automation, preventative maintenance, configuration management, and technology integration. In addition, Paul has a strong emphasis on thorough requirement gathering, technical specifications, documentation, rigorous analytics and analysis methodologies.

Basically, Paul’s job is to keep the CEO on his toes, and make sure our investors still like us.

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Pat Condon

Board Member

Pat Condon is one of the co-founders of Rackspace Managed Hosting (NYSE: RAX) and is an investor and Board Member at Pear Analytics. He was a key player in developing Rackspace’s unique customer service mantra of Fanatical Support ™. Pat was also instrumental in the acquisition of webmail.us in 2007.

Rackspace is now one of the largest hosting companies in the world with 8 data centers in Texas, Virginia and the UK.

Pat earned his BA in Finance from Santa Clara University.

Morris Miller

Board Member

Morris is a co-founder of Rackspace Managed Hosting (NYSE: RAX) and is an investor and Board Member at Pear Analytics. He also acted as co-CEO and co-Chairman at Rackspace where he helped grow the company to more than 30,000 customers and over $500 million in revenue.

Morris is an alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy, University of Texas at Austin, and the Southern Methodist University School of Law.

About Pear Analytics is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

You might not expect it, but these entrepreneurs each have something to say about customers – the critical component to any startup.

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur who teaches entrepreneurship at UC Berkley and Stanford University, and the concept of Customer Development which is outlined in his book, 4 Steps to the Epiphany.

Steve clearly defines a startup as an entity who’s job is to discover a repeatable and scalable business model. Ideally you should find this business model before you start investing a significant amount of funds into the business. Steve cites several examples in his book (he really likes the Webvan story from the 90′s) where startups fail because they never bothered to find out what the customer wanted, why they liked or disliked about the product, how they used the product, and what would make them pay money for it (or not).

Steve believes it is crucial that the founders of the startup “get out of the building” and find the needs of the customers and who they are (customer discovery) and then test your hypothesis against a sample group of these customers (customer validation). If the test fails, it means you have to go back to the drawing board again (the “pivot”). You can’t go on and build your customers, and hence build the business, until you have found something scalable and repeatable. Many startups make the mistake of marketing their product heavily and hiring a small army of sales folks (customer creation and company building) to sell the product before they pass “customer validation” piece, and then scratch their heads as to why no one is willing to pay for the product.

Diagram courtesy of stevblank.com

37 Signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, who just released their book Rework, have a different take. They’ve built a business on developing a product that THEY want to use, instead of listening to what everyone else wants.  They talk about how to “say no” to customer requests, instead of being pulled in fifty directions by listening to them.  They talk about “scratching your own itch” and building a product you would use yourself.  “When you solve your own problem, you know exactly what to do.  When you solve someone else’s problem, you’re stabbing in the dark,” says Fried.

The book offers several concepts on how to build and run a small business while defying everything you think is “normal”.  Over 1,000 people a week sign up to use their products, Basecamp, Backpack and HiRise and have done so without any outside investment.

Then you have Mark Cuban, a successful entrepreneur who did well during the dot com boom and is now the current owner of the NBA basketball team Dallas Mavericks.  Usually cited for his brash remarks, Cuban talks about a variety of things on his blog from the stock market to Facebook privacy.  I recently found this on his bog the other day: “Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers“.  Cuban basically says that entrepreneurs far too often try to emulate their competitors down to the feature, which prevents them from inventing anything truly unique and different.  So now when a customer requests a feature, its usually because of a feature they saw on a competitive product that they wish your product had.  He says “its not the job of your customers to know what they don’t know” and that every entrepreneurs job is to “invent the future.”  Steve Blank makes a similar comparison in a blog post entitled “Death by Competitive Analysis” where he says “instead of optimizing for a minimum feature set (as defined by customers), a competitive analysis drives a maximum feature set.”

These are all different views on how finding and listening to customers can affect your business.  There may not be any one right answer, but in the end, we think you should definitely listen to your customers, and that you (the software developer) should be a customer of the product.  We believe in the concept of eating your own dog food, rather than trying to build a product in a vacuum.  At then end of the day, we think it’s important to have an active customer feedback loop, but be careful not to go off into the weeds building one-off features that will only be useful to a few users.

What Do Steve Blank, 37 Signals and Mark Cuban Have in Common? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

So, it seems Adobe and Apple have decided to spend some money advertising by means of “open letters” Here’s my letter to both of them.

We get it, you don’t mean any harm and you think what you’re doing/asking for is best for the consumer.

The case for Adobe.

In an ideal world, it would be awesome if I wrote something once, and it worked across all platforms. It really would be cool if I could press a button and my code became an iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry app.

The case against Adobe.
Individual companies have been trying this for years, we’ve called it different things, and they’ve failed.

Sun started this with Java, “it’s cross platform! write once, run anywhere! world peace!”. How many people still use Java “applets”?.

Youtube and other flash player based websites were awesome, finally, one didn’t need realplayer, windows media player, and some other start ups “innovative” new adware player. The consumers made the case for you, and you won that battle. Then you proceeded to drop your pants, and dance.. and you got caught. You didn’t anticipate the growth in mobile phones for browsing, you didn’t think about how your tech would be used in web browsers where the mouse wasn’t the primary form of input.

Had you any foresight, leadership and innovation, you wouldn’t be in this situation. You’re trying to confuse the masses, because you yourself are confused. Who is your customer? The App developers? The Web developers? Or is it the people who are using the apps, and browsing the web sites? If you follow the money, in the end, your
customers are the people who don’t care what technology is used, as long as they get the content they thought they were going to get.

You have not made the same case for mobile devices, on phones that do support flash, the experience of viewing a flash website is horrible. You’ve had since 2006 to solve this issue, and from all recent reports.. you haven’t made any progress. So, with a 4 year track record of failing…. why should anyone trust you?

Why should we think that your cross platform tools will work as expected? You haven’t been able to keep up with changes in the mobile landscape, what makes you think you’ll keep up with changes?

The case for Apple.
You’ve spent a lot of time money building the iPhone OS, and you’re about to reveal OS Touch, or whatever Steve decides to call it. You’ve made it clear, you don’t care about quantity, your only concern is quality, and in the process you’ll piss people off. In the world of hardware development, you’re actually faster than most people would like to admit, or give you credit for.

The case against Apple.
You could screw up, you could take away a feature, or you could incorporate a feature into your OS that negates an app completely. We’re all aware of it, and it’s a risk we’re willing to take. Because, for the past 10 years, your track record, makes us want to be on your side.

Apple, fanboys will justify anything you do, and haters will find something wrong with you saving all the puppies in the world.

So What’s Next?
Adobe, first admit that you dropped the ball, go back to the drawing board, and come back. Don’t try to win a PR war for something that doesn’t exist. Flash for mobile doesn’t suck because of Apple, it sucks because of you. Apple is historically slow in adopting technologies, they weren’t the first with the mp3 player, the touch phone, the tablet, but they are the best. Get that through your ego.

Apple, keep doing what you’re doing, I wish you were more open about your intentions, but I understand that development by committee doesn’t make sense, and your committee would become too big, too quickly. We all remember System 7, copland, and your other failures. It’s obvious you do too, keep it up, don’t get too cocky.

An Open Letter to closed companies is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.