I'm a lurker, not a poster for the most part. And as you can see from our blog, we don't write that often. We don't really do content marketing. Any revenue we make as a result of this post certainly won't cover the time I've spent writing it. Hiri is a bit specialist.
Would be happy to tag the posts - think it's pretty clear this is a company blog though. Your point is well taken/made all the same.
- (probably) team upvote boost to trigger front page
Nope - the HN algo would murder us for this. Don't risk it.
- 50% off promotion ending in ~4 hours with the tagline "you'll never see this offer again".
You'll see this if it's your first visit to the site, been that way for a while. But that's another article...
You're right. It is unusual. We went with Exchange Web Services first instead of IMAP. Our initial target market were larger companies and we wanted to have deep integration with their Exchange servers (Calendars, Contacts, etc).
We stripped every feature that made our product different and put them in an 'app store'. This was a huge change (a lot of work and a big risk), and not something I've seen others do as an on-boarding strategy. Thus, novel. I believe this approach could be repeated by others. It's a far cry from the usual walkthroughs, carousels and prompts.
So basically putting advanced features into a separate section, making them togglable and calling this section an App Store?
They are still mentioned on the homepage and in a form of a carousel at that.
I appreciate that this must've been a significant rework, with all edge cases considered, but sectioning off parts of a software and making them discoverable in a course of normal use is not exactly novel... I mean that's just too bold of claim to be thrown around lightly. The story is still interesting, but something a bit more exact like "Here's what worked for us remarkably well" would've been more suitable.
>However, I'd rather not have the Linux community "embrace proprietary software with open arms", thank you very much.
Why? What possible harm could it do?
>Why are you defending yourself and exactly what against?
I didn't write the article as a defence. I wrote it as food for thought. I would like to see Linux usage increase. I believe those that reject proprietary software outright are preventing this from happening. A vocal minority give the impression that proprietary software is not welcome. This has not been our experience.
I make an important distinction in the article. The FOSS community is not one 'type' of person. There are plenty in the FOSS community who use proprietary software. I have yet to hear a compelling argument on this thread for using FOSS software exclusively.
Would be happy to tag the posts - think it's pretty clear this is a company blog though. Your point is well taken/made all the same.