Eric Sink's newest 'Business of Software' column on MSDN.
I have several products either released or under development.
I really enjoyed this article, particularly the section on 'Shareware'. Anyone who frequents the 'alt.comp.shareware.authors' newsgroup knows that there isn't really a globally accepted definition for shareware. I completely agree with this statement:
In the end, I have concluded that I don't care what the term "shareware" means or what connotations it may have.
The big guideline I came away with after reading his article (of which I'm guilty of violating):
Don't start too big
As a single developer working on my products, it's tough to keep the 1.0 release small. This, of course, could be why I haven't released version 1.0 of the two projects I have under development. Maybe it's time to revisit my current “1.0 feature list” and scale it back.