The Story of Etresoft

Etresoft was born sometime in 1996 under the name of Columbine Technology in Fort Collins, Colorado. In graduate school one day, I overheard people talking about someone who had set up a part-time software company and was making about $200 a month writing shareware. That sounded very interesting. Since graduate school wasn’t very taxing anyway, I though I had a prime opportunity to give it a try. My first program was called Decoder, the story of which you can read elsewhere.

I was still pretty clueless in 1996. I soon discovered that Columbine Technology was a very poor name for a business in Colorado. In 1997, I changed the company name to Harmony Software. This time, I did extensive research and verified that there was no other Harmony Software in existence. Decoder became quite popular and Harmony Software started to attract attention.

Unfortunately, there was trouble brewing with that name too. On vacation in San Francisco one day, I was reading the help wanted ads and discovered that Harmony Software was hiring! Apparently, someone else had decided to start a company and didn’t do quite as much research as I had done. Still, I was first and in a different state, so I didn’t worry too much about it.

The coup de grâce came in 1999 when Harmony Software was served with a cease and desist order from some other company I had never heard of. Apparently, they had taken out a trademark for the word “harmony” associated with the word “e-mail”. Our products were completely different, but they had money and lawyers on their side. I had to find a new name.

Another vacation, this time to France, provided the answer. I came up with the name Etresoft. The name is very fitting. It combines my two loves of la langue française and computer software. Plus, it is virtually unpronounceable by the vast majority of Americans. Thus, it is pretty safe from the big companies. As it is also part English, it should be safe from the French companies as well. Last but not least, it gives me a clever naming scheme for future products. EtreTask sounds much better than Decoder.

The Future of Etresoft

Etresoft survived the dot-com bubble bursting - many bigger companies did not. While I’ve had very good luck with Decoder, its days are numbered. Few people need an e-mail attachment decoding utility anymore. I can see the potential need for a replacement to e-mail itself.

In the future, Etresoft will focus on software that works the way I feel it should work. EtreTask is a good start. I’m not going to focus so much on commercial success, but on writing good software that I would use myself. That means more freeware and a different strategy for shareware. Stay tuned...