Welcome to Macintalk, my series of monthly interviews with people who make a difference in the Mac world and beyond.
This month our inquiring mouse points to Roy Schulze, one of three do-it-alls for Galleon Software. Galleon is a small software house which is best known for eMerge, a program unique to the Mac world. Read what Roy has to say about this fascinating program and earning a living working for a small company. And see if he finds a way to say something nice about the Wintel World.
Check out this month's interview, then e-mail me your ideas, comments, and suggestions for who you would like to see interviewed in an upcoming issue.
Interview conducted 20-22 October1998
 
Bruce Klutchko: Your website describes Galleon Software as "a small, hungry Canadian development company specializing in desktop communications software for all those little markets that the dinosaurs never pay attention to." Place the location a bit to the south, and we could be describing a certain small competitor to Wintel which makes the Mac itself. Please tell us more about Galleon Software, its philosophy, and what it's like to work there.
Roy Schulze: The comparison is flattering, and we do make some effort to follow the better aspects of the Apple model, but I'm afraid that the comparison comes to an abrupt stop in the accounting department. We're small and entirely self-financed. Success for us right now means that we've always managed to pay the bills, and that we're already taking home a paycheck.
This self-sufficiency, I suppose, is a large part of the Galleon philosophy. We all value our independence and work hard to maintain a lean and loose organization and to avoid getting caught in the expensive trap of maintaining a "corporate" image. It also leaves us free to move quickly to address problems and take advantage of new opportunities.
Galleon Software was founded a little over two years ago by Colin Biggin and Scott Appleton, two of the original employees of SoftArc, another Canadian company and the developers of the FirstClass BBS. After five years making money for somebody else, they figured it was time to start their own company and put into practice some of what they had learned helping SoftArc grow.
BK: Tell us about yourself – your background, interests, and especially what attracted you to Galleon.
RS: You can read all the dirty details on our website, if you're interested,
at http://www.galleon.com/galleon/staff/roy , but suffice it to say that I'm a bit of a dilettante, with a background in computer science and a talent for words and pictures.
I met Colin when we were both working at Northern Telecom, and it was he who brought me into SoftArc to build their Documentation and Design department. When it came time for Galleon Software to bring their first product to market, Colin invited me to join his new company and manage the stuff that developers aren't particularly good at.
BK: I understand you once programmed in COBOL. Not much use for that in Mac land, is there?
RS: Every time my mother reads another article on the Millennium Bug, she tells me I should quit Galleon Software and join the COBOL programmers making their fortune fixing old applications. I usually have to remind her that I haven't worked in that sort of environment for more than ten years and that I didn't much like it anyway when I quit.
BK: China has a Great Wall that is 3,000 miles long — about as long as the US-Canadian border. Somehow I think our border is far less of an obstacle than the Great Wall once was to China's neighbors to the north. Are there any differences from either your perspective or your customers' perspective because of your location in Toronto?
RS: The Web, as we all know, has largely done away with the notion of international boundaries. Our offices are in Toronto, for instance, but our server is down in Florida and our customers are all over the world. With most of the Macintosh industry located on the West Coast, I find I have more trouble dealing with time zones than borders, and I have to wait until the afternoon to make most of my phone calls.
BK: Is there a special camaraderie working in a small company?
RS: Working closely together in a such a small company tends to bring out the best and the worst in people, but we've managed to keep a good balance through the first lean years, and I expect that experience will serve us well now as the company begins to grow.
It's still largely Colin, Scott, and myself; but we've been working more and more on cooperative ventures with other companies. We've learned that such alliances are terribly important to a small software company: they bring in new ideas, they help spread the work around, and they give us a much larger pool of experience and expertise on which to draw.
BK: Just how does the little guy manage in a world dominated by dinosaurs? Can you succeed? For that matter, do you think the Mac can succeed?
RS: With eMerge, we've been doing well chasing after a market the dinosaurs apparently do not want to touch. Of course that's largely thanks to all the controversy surrounding bulk e-mail and spam, but I think it is also a case that the technology involved is spread around the larger companies in such away that you've got someone doing contact management, another group handling e-mail, and a third with a mail merge module built into a large cumbersome text editor; and there's no corporate mechanism in place to bring the necessary parts together.
In contrast, Galleon can move quickly in response to these opportunities, and we find it easy to work together with other small companies that possess the talents and expertise we do not. From the people I've met in the last few years, it appears that most developers can at least make a living doing what we've been doing in the Macintosh market. And with a little more work and some business savvy, they should soon be quite successful.
Extending that thinking to computer platforms is a bit of a stretch. Apple is hardly a "little guy," it's just that the big guy is so much bigger, and a bit of a bully to boot. The last few years were scary for a lot of Macintosh developers, but the future's looking pretty good right now, and I never fail to be cheered by the overwhelming support of Mac enthusiasts.
BK: Working in the Mac market, even 100% of the market is only around 10% of the market. What are the economics like? How do you guys avoid having to go over to the other (Wintel) side?
RS: I've been an Apple fan since before I managed to scrape enough money together to buy my first Apple II plus, and I've been working on the Mac since the Macintosh II first came out.
And although the developers each have a solid Windows background, the Macintosh market is the market we all know the best and the market we feel most comfortable in.
The sales are smaller than they'd likely be in the Windows market, but there are far fewer competitive products, which suits us fine. eMerge, in fact, is the only Macintosh application that does what it does. The competition is largely built using SuperCard or FileMaker, and several of these have dropped out of the market since we began.
The greatest challenge we face is in the marketing of a Macintosh application. In the case of eMerge, it makes good sense to concentrate our efforts on a number of market niches. The problem is, however, that we can't really market to university professors, to choose an example, without marketing to the even smaller niche of university professors who also happen to use a Macintosh. We'd be wasting roughly 90% of our marketing efforts.
So we're caught between this rock and a hard place that is trying to market to the general Macintosh user, 90% of whom probably don't have an immediate need for our product.
As for going over to the other side, we already have. We've been creating cross-platform FileMaker plug-ins with a company called Waves in Motion. We do find some consolation, however, by developing them first for the Macintosh on a Macintosh.
We've also been talking for some time of porting eMerge onto the Windows platform, but we would do this primarily so that we could take advantage of cross-platform opportunities, such as bundling with cross-platform web tools or selling site licenses in cross-platform environments.
The cost of marketing such a beast, however, is beyond us at the moment; and our past experience has shown us the danger of leaving the warm little Macintosh pond without enough cash to make yourself heard out on the Windows ocean.
BK: You once had a job for SoftArc, Inc. Your entire department was ultimately eliminated. Was the disbanding of your department a result of the the economic pressures in the Mac software industry?
RS: It was at least partly due to the economic pressures within SoftArc itself. By that point, FirstClass was a fully cross-platform product and the company had devoted a huge amount of money to breaking into the Windows market. Unfortunately, this effort coincided with the rise of the Internet, the decline of proprietary e-mail, and a corresponding drop in FirstClass sales. To cut a long story short, the Windows marketing campaign was a resounding flop and the company began losing money for the first time in their history, while ironically the Internet market was growing like crazy.
In the middle of all this, the opinion arose that printed manuals were a needless extravagance and that any manuals SoftArc did choose to print could be printed for less if we sacrificed quality. And although SoftArc's documentation was generally lauded by the press, the technical writing community, and most importantly by our customers, there were some serious differences of opinion at the senior management level over the approach taken by myself and my department which ultimately led to my termination, the termination of our graphic designer, and the subsequent exodus of the remainder of the department.
It was a pretty rough time for everyone involved, but I think we all learned a lot from it.
 
BK: Another example of the old maxim
which says that which doesn't kill you,
strengthens you. Your main product is
eMerge, which is an Internet email
application. Who is the primary user of
eMerge, and what exactly does eMerge do?
RS: eMerge combines broadcast e-mail
with the mail-merge functionality found
in most word processors. It allows you to
write an e-mail form letter and merge it
with a database of names, e-mail addresses,
and any other variables you are able to
customize for each message you send.
Most eMerge customers are people who
are already sending a lot of e-mail to a large
list of people on a regular basis. eMerge just makes it easier to do, and lets you do some other cool things that were once next to impossible.
Specifically, though, we've sold a number of copies to teachers and university professors who use eMerge to send marks and special announcements to their students. A number of employment agencies are using eMerge to keep in touch with their clients and job candidates. And for some reason, we seem to be quite popular with record companies and fan clubs.
But mostly it's small to medium-sized businesses who are doing business on the Internet and who need a way of keeping in touch with their customers and follow up with the people who visit their web page.
BK: Who programmed eMerge, and what language was it written in?
RS: Colin and Scott are the developers. They used C++ under Code Warrior.
BK: Please tell us how using eMerge differs from sending spam. [Spam, often called junk email, is unrequested, usually unwanted e-mail from commercial enterprises selling everything from get-rich-quick schemes to credit rehab to things we don't really want or need, and some we didn't even know existed.]
RS: The best way to answer that question is to go back to why we developed eMerge in the first place.
We are very friendly with the owners of Sienna Software, the developers of Starry Night. A few years ago, they learned that someone had worked out their serial numbering scheme and posted the crack on the Internet. They quickly developed a new scheme, but they couldn't find an easy way of distributing new serial numbers to each of their customers. Colin and Scott had just left SoftArc, and so they decided to build it.
Now, just because eMerge was created with the best of intentions, doesn't mean it can't be used as a spam tool. The thing is, though, it's not a particularly good spam tool. It customizes and sends each message individually, so it's not nearly as fast as a spammer would want it to be. And it contains none of the cloaking technology spammers need in order to avoid retaliation from the anti-spam crowd.
BK: That would probably be most of us. Speaking of spam, how big a problem is it? Do you think, as some people do, that it could even bring about the downfall of our Internet email system as we know it?
RS: I understand the arguments, but I can only speak from personal experience. I've been on the net now for six years or so, I have never worried about concealing my email address from email harvesters, and I get so little spam it's not even worth talking about.
I sometimes think the greater danger is in the automatic mechanisms people are putting in place in an attempt to filter out spam. I've encountered situations where legitimate mail of mine has been bounced by servers or simply deleted without any warning.
BK: That would be a danger. You have to agree, however, that most people would feel more strongly about finding five or ten unsolicited e-mails, some of which are X-rated.
RS: It depends, I suppose, on whether you are just exploring the Internet at home or trying to run a business by email. If ISPs are arbitrarily deleting mail they think might be spam, they are seriously threatening the integrity of the whole system. Given this alternative, I can live with the odd dirty email.
If the main concern is that spam is offending people's sensibilities, then it becomes an individual choice to filter certain email on their mailbox; and the applications that let people do this for email and web pages is certainly getting more and more sophisticated.
BK: What about the laws against spam that some states are enacting. Are they an answer?
RS: I don't think you can legislate civilized discourse, especially when the medium is so free and easy to use. The only real solution would be to start charging people for the email they send, but we all know how well that would be received!
Labeling email according to its content shows some promise of at least making such email less annoying to individuals. But the alternative suggestion of dragging every desktop spammer through the legal system is impractical and, in my opinion, unworkable.
My hope is, though, that it will all settle down sooner than later. Right now, the two sides in this issue are entrenched and their tactics are often too extreme, and the upshot is that ordinary people are having trouble doing legitimate business over the Internet. You have people, for instance, forgetting that they've signed up for someone's mailing list and then jumping into anti-spam action when they receive a piece of e-mail they don't immediately recognize.
And, of course, all this makes my job a lot more difficult—selling a product that has millions of good uses into a market that reviles the way a handful of people misuse it.
BK: Tell us more about how eMerge is used. Could you give us some scenarios of its use by regular computer users? How about for use by professionals?
RS: We built eMerge for a Macintosh developer, so we weren't surprised when others starting to buy it. GoLive, for instance, used eMerge to manage their beta program for CyberStudio 3; and I think another copy has found its way into their marketing department. Nova Development was one of our first customers, and Markzware is using it as a marketing tool. Those are some of the big names we've recognized, but we've also sold to a number copies to smaller developers like ourselves.
If you want to see some other good "professional" examples, I invite you to visit our website. Or download our demo from some sample eMerge campaigns.
http://www.galleon.com/emerge/use/
http://www.galleon.com/emerge/demo/
As for "regular" users, I know we have one customer who uses eMerge to keep in touch with a large group of people he worked with years ago, but you might also use it to spruce up your annual Christmas form letter, or send out a change of address to your friends and relations.
We figure that once your mailing list has more than twenty people on it, you should consider using a tool, like eMerge, better suited to the job. Nobody likes getting a TO list that is longer than the message itself. And everybody likes a personalized message, even if they suspect that you might have faked it a bit.
BK: So eMerge-generated email looks like personalized e-mail?
RS: In fact, it IS personalized email: every message is unique, mailed to only one person, and as unique as you care to make it. From talking to our customers, it seems that most people at least personalize each message with a Dear <<firstname>> at the top, but it's just as easy to create something like: Dear <<firstname>>, how are things with the <<lastname>> family? By the way, you owe us <<amount>>!
BK: How much can the email be customized? I understand the user can even do a small amount of "programming."
RS: eMerge has a number of standard variables you can insert into your messages, such as the recipients first or last name, or the date that the message was sent. But we also let you define up to ten custom variables that you can enter for each recipient or import the information from a database.
Several customers have asked us to add the ability to make certain decisions based on these values, and we are planning on introducing some programming in an upcoming release; but right now, we figure you can get your database application to do that dirty work.
BK: I don't think most of our readers understand that there is a faster way to send email than through their own SMTP server. Please tell us how eMerge does it, and why this is often faster.
RS: Unlike your favorite email client, eMerge has its own built-in mail engine. This allows it to function in two different modes.
The first mode is identical to that of the email client — when you send your mail, it's delivered to your regular mail server one message at a time, and the mail server does the hard work of making sure it gets where it's going.
The second mode is Direct Delivery, which brings a lot of the mail server's functionality to your desktop. When you send your mail, eMerge bypasses you mail server and negotiates directly with each mail server on your list. First it determines if the server exists, then it determines if the recipient has a mailbox on that server, and finally it delivers the message directly to that mailbox.
The thing is, where your typical email client opens only one connection to your mail server, eMerge lets you open up as many as two dozen direct connections, all sending email at once!
BK: Something I didn't know, and very impressive.
RS: You can also save a wad of time managing your mailing list with eMerge. When you use your regular email client, errors are returned back to you in an email message. As your mailing list gets larger, all these messages become harder and harder to manage. With eMerge, however, the error appears right next to the entry on your mailing list. Deleting dead addresses is dead easy, and your mailbox doesn't get clogged with returns.
BK: Can email be sent with attachments?
RS: Yes. You can attach as many files as you want, though we warn you if your messages start getting too big. eMerge can handle it, but it still takes an awfully long time to send so many copies of the very same file. Instead we recommend that people consider creating a link to the file and let each recipient decide whether to download it or not.
BK: Good idea. How large can an email list be? In a typical situation, how long does it take to actually send the email to 100 recipients?
RS: The size of the mailing list is limited only by the amount of memory you allocate to eMerge. I typically send to lists of 1000 or so, but we do have some customers who maintain lists of 100,000 and more. One customer, for instance, is responsible for managing the chat rooms for radio stations all over North America, and they use eMerge to keep in touch with the people who visit these rooms. And I've been getting regular updates from an ISP in Belgium who informs me that his list is currently at 112,000 email addresses and growing by 1,000 per day.
The few speed tests we've conducted show that you should expect to send about 3000 messages an hour over a 28.8 K line. One hundred messages should take a couple of minutes.
BK: You mentioned a demo earlier. How does it differ from the full program?
RS: The demo is available on our website at http://www.galleon.com/emerge/demo . It does everything the full version does, except that it will only send ten messages before you have to restart the application. Also, it lets you build a list of any size, but it only lets you save lists ten people long.
BK: How does Galleon provide support to users? Do you charge for tech support?
RS: We offer free technical support by e-mail and phone.
BK: Which other programs do your users also frequently find useful and/or necessary alongside eMerge?
RS: We still encourage our customers to use FileMaker to manage their data — we don't pretend eMerge is a full featured database. And we've worked hard to make sure that it's easy to import data exported from FileMaker.
BK: What are Galleon's plans for future development… can you share them with us at this time?
RS: Speaking of FileMaker, our big push right now is to finish our email plug-in for Macworld San Francisco. eMerge FM will bring all the functionality of our email engine to FileMaker databases, including the address verification provided by Direct Delivery.
We're planning new releases of eMerge, including HTML functions that will allow you to build customized electronic fliers, more sophisticated list management, and full AppleScriptability.
We've had a number of customers request a tool that could pick out the contact information from their e-mail archives and parse the fields in email forms. So we've been working on a new product called Data Dredger that can be configured to extract information from pretty much any type of regularly formatted text file. Data Dredger is in beta now and will likely move to public beta before the end of the year.
 
Many thanks to Roy for taking the time during a busy week to answer these questions. Being one of only a few key employees means being more important than being one of a thousand at Microsloth.
If there is a well-known person in the Mac community that you are dying to learn more about, please let me know. We would love to hear your suggestions and your comments about my column.
