Which technology is worth paying for?

Consider, for starters, that most prosaic of office tools, the telephone. When we first moved out of my spare bedroom and into an office downtown a couple of years ago, we got some quotes on a phone system that would serve our modest staff of five. Three or four thousand dollars was the range, plus another thousand-plus for the additional ducts and wiring we’d need in our ageing building.

Why is it that computers get cheaper and more powerful every day, and phone systems don’t?

We opted for the low-cost option: cordless phones, or rather two sets of them, one for each line. Thus the common cry in our cozy office: “anyone have a black phone?” Supplemented by cellphones, the system works OK, sort of, but honestly if I had to make the decision again I probably would have bought the phone system. The cost in lost productivity, and in the amateur appearance that fumbling with phones sometimes conveys, is probably small, but it adds up over time.

Another routine set of tools that remains remarkably expensive is basic desktop software, specifically Microsoft Office. There are plenty of alternatives when it comes to word processors or spreadsheets or e-mail clients, but it’s still surprisingly hard to get away from the one that everyone uses and everyone knows how to use. List price for a copy of Office is still around $500 – almost as much as the computer itself – and the fact that few people actually pay this price makes it even more annoying.

Why can’t Microsoft figure out a way to make money on Office that doesn’t leave people feeling ripped off? And why can’t we learn to do without it?

When it comes to the specialised graphics software needed for photo handling and print magazine production, we’re also talking about serious dollars. At the last magazine I ran, I used to gripe about the high cost and poor support associated with Quark, which was then the only real option. Now Adobe has a terrific set of graphics and layout programs that work well together – but it can be as much as $3,000 for a single package.

Then there is the issue of databases and their close cousins, customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Simple database software is more or less free. But developing a system that can manage all the data associated with advertising clients, NewWest.Net members, e-mail newsletter subscribers, conference attendees, print magazine subscribers, and potential members of any of the aforementioned categories is a whole different thing.

In the old days, it would have been nearly impossible on the face of it for a small company to manage something like magazine fulfillment by itself. So the fact that we’re wrestling with the question at all is progress. But I know from experience how badly a CRM project can go wrong – we wasted more than a million dollars trying to make this work at the Industry Standard – so I’ve been reluctant to bite the bullet and make a big investment in this. For now we use the free alternative (it involves lots of spreadsheets) but that won’t be viable for much longer.

I think the very fact that so much of our technology is so cheap has made me rebel against spending on the things that are comparatively expensive, even when I should. A start-up CEO should always be a penny-pincher, but as I write this column and squint at my laptop, I also think to myself: just pony up and get a proper monitor! By my standards they are not “cheap” quite yet, but they’re getting there, and at around $500 for a good-sized one I’m sure it’s a worthy investment. But it’s not always easy to tell.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard