I founded Tribal Limited in 1996. The name "Tribal" seemed appropriate, since the internet was emerging as a medium for bringing people together. At a time when others were treating the web as a new kind of TV station, we were developing online communities with thousands of users.
We've always had an emphasis on a high quality of service and responsiveness - it's not my style to give anything less. We've derived our competitive edge by listening just that bit better to our customers, and by thinking that bit harder about the solution. I think it helped that we stuck to employing high-quality, permanent staff.
In the early years we developed virtual communities for customers like Novell and HP, moving on to other sites with content management tools. What we delivered seemed clever at the time, though rudimentary these days. We developed more customers - a few large ones and many small ones. Many seemed pleased just to find someone that would "speak English to them". I'm pleased to say most of them are still with us.
Back then, our deliverables were more in intelligent technology than cool visual design. But over time we focussed more on the user experience. These days people say they like our graphic designs, a testament to our team. Awards for Thames Water, Goodman Jones and other websites have been nice. It's right to focus on visuals these days: I believe that success isn't about what you invent; it's about how you connect people to it.
Did we followed the perfect path? Hardly. I have to admit: we invented the same systems several times along the way. How inefficient! That's why in we created our first content management product: TribalCMS.
TribalCMS gave us a platform to build sites upon; at last we could give customers the basic management tools without having to keep re-inventing them. You could edit pages, grow your site, password-protect your content...a whole range of things which customers loved. I've never been a believer in charging customers to do simple things which they ought to be able to do themselves. It's better to invest in a platform which gives them freedom, than to charge them for changing a full stop to a comma. Customers like freedom, so make 'em stay by not locking them in.
But that's just a small part of what a CMS gives you. It's better to run your site on a platform that's stable, widely-used but advancing all the time (and without you paying for it). And you can't do better than have that platform provided by its very developers.
We're an open source company. We've always used Apache, Linux, Perl, PHP, MySQL. They're brilliant products, and free. We figured that TribalCMS should be free too, and so it was.
And not just the code. What use is open source code, if you can't fathom your way through it? So we offered high-quality documentation to help people use and design templates for it.
I think that 90% of people love the idea of "free", and would run their business on free software. But a few can't afford this risk; they need dependability. That's why it seemed natural to offer a dual-licensed product. Freedom for the masses, and a commercial, full-support product for those who need a guarantee.
TRIBiQ CMS is really an evolution of TribalCMS. It still has the same ease of getting started. But it has developed into a having a GPL core plus commercial modules aimed at web designers and organizations who want multi-site, multi-lingual functionality.
That just about bring us up to date. I'd love to tell you about the future, but it's better if you watch this space.
Tony Butcher, Founder and CEO (November 2007)
