I don't think we have changed our focus... we may have diversified our approach.
Our goal has always been to make complex web sites easier to create.
It started years ago with Drumbeat Extension, then Dreamweaver extensions. We found that too many people weren't successful and everyone wanted a working example, so we created one and our first solutions were born.
I wanted to give them away for free as an example of how our products work, but we were worried about cannibalization of sales, and the limits on solutions designed in that way, so we decided to sell them and make them more complex, and that is where PowerStore and PowerCMS came im.
The solutions have been really helpful for us for research. Users who purchase the solutions can get up and running much more quickly and give us more feedback... positive or negative we can turn that into a better product.
From there the solutions evolve much more quickly than extensions can, but we are now going back and working the new technology born from solutions back into the extensions. Creating web sites with our extensions in the form of solutions helps us evolve. We can better see the shortcomings and issues and fill those gaps by working with the tools and not just on them.
None of the previous functionality from the individual tools is going away. So it will get easier and not harder to use and understand our tools. Yes you will have to buy Universal Email to get file upload, but now once you upload a file and want to email it, you won't need to purchase anything else.
You can apply one wizard to get all of the code you need, or you can go into the individual server behaviors like you did and deconstruct how they work to learn php or sql or javascript or html or css. We are trying to broaden our audience by making things easier.
If we push the bar lover and past some invisible line where it works for "non-developers" that isn't something we are actively avoiding, however a developer who understands php, htiml, sql, css, flash or any number of other technologies that allows them to consider themselves a developer, they can easily find ways to add value by builing on the solutions as a foundation instead of starting from scratch.
I guess we do have a goal to make everyone successful who tries... that isn't limited to someone with the credentials to call themselves a "developer" by your standards, but we have always said that our tools would teach people to be developers if they tried even if they weren't when they started... it sounds like it worked for you... may not have been painless, but you may be a suceess story and a testimate to the reality that we may have made it easier to become a developer, but you still need to be one before you can accomplish everything you or your client might need.
