Rescue at cc:

>>> "Monday morning I sat down to my E-mail expecting a load of justified vitriol, and instead was overwhelmed by kindness and good wishes .... A users group led by Tom Danner, someone I view as immensely capable, is creating a new company to carry on the work of Haven Corp. ... I will not be a part of the new company." --Bruce

When Holmes finally resurfaced on August 22, in message #209 of the HavenWizards forum, he put to rest both his customers' lingering concerns for his well-being and their questions about who would head up the new company. Danner was the undisputed leader. And he knew what he needed. "We had to get the source code, the intellectual-property rights, and access to the customer database," Danner says.

More easily said than done. The next several weeks were grueling as Danner carried on protracted negotiations with Holmes, whom he describes as often hard to reach, emotionally drained, and, of course, nearly 2,000 miles distant from Danner's home base in Redmond. At the same time, Danner was running his own company and trying to nail down financing for the new organization.

Distracted as he was by the exercise in on-the-fly company building, Danner still worried about Wizard users' defecting to competitors, who had the undeniable advantage of existing. He viewed HavenWizards -- where Wizard watchers traded technical advice, resource information, and news -- as the perfect circling of wagons. Consequently, he continued to moderate the forum and post daily messages, even when life became almost unbearably hectic.

Danner's faith in the forum's cohesive powers proved to be well placed. Conventional wisdom would have predicted that the longer Wizard users went without technical support, the more susceptible they would be to outside pitches. But as time wore on, the HavenWizards grew increasingly protective of both their forum and its nascent project. When one member tried to set himself up as a reseller of a Haven competitor's product, the rest of the forum voted him "off the island," Survivor-style. "I was pissed," says Peggy Glenn, owner of Firefighters Bookstore, in Huntington Beach, Calif. "One of our own was working to resurrect the company, and along came the piranhas."

>>> "I think when the dust settles, this will be one of the great stories of belief of customers in the current and POTENTIAL products of a supplier in trouble and how they got together, fought off the circling sharks, and emerged with a commitment to support the current product and resources to produce new ones." -- Charley Kehoe

Then, in late August, events took an unexpected turn. Smith-Gardner & Associates Inc. (recently renamed Ecometry Corp.), a $50-million publicly traded provider of enterprise software based in Delray Beach, Fla., approached Danner with an offer to buy or invest in what remained of Haven. Once again, HavenWizards played a crucial, if unconscious, role. Smith-Gardner president and chief operating officer John Marrah, who had spent hours lurking in the forum, says that the passionate customer support he witnessed there was "absolutely one of the deciding factors" in moving forward with an offer for Haven. "It really helped us make our decision very quickly and easily," he says.

But the new player immediately complicated Danner's relationships both with Holmes and with HavenWizards by insisting that Danner sign a nondisclosure agreement. For some six weeks the previously outspoken Danner was forced to craft forum postings that were unflaggingly optimistic without being wholly forthcoming. Holmes, meanwhile, knew nothing of the potential acquirer when he signed over Haven's intellectual property and source code to Danner. Danner planned to reassign the rights to Smith-Gardner when the deal moved forward.

>>> "Greetings! I'm pleased to announce that the first phase of restructuring is complete and we will resume support of all Wizard users immediately at no charge. I will be traveling to Chicago this week to wrap up details with Bruce and the crew." --Tom Danner

A collective sigh of relief rose up from forum members in late September, when Wizard technical support returned. With it came the software's development team. In mid-September, Danner had signed contracts with six of Haven's eight former employees. It was progress, clearly, but only partial progress. And that wasn't good enough for forum members, who were being forced to make long-term plans based on short-term information.

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