In the pursuit of collaborative intelligence... : Software

Pros and cons of software selling model "cheap product, expensive support"

Ed Daniel — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:45:00 GMT

I came across this LinkedIn Answer post today:

"Can anyone suggest a good set (or source) of pros and cons of "sell cheap/free, support for money" approach? Like Oracle do, for example. The software i'm talking about is for financial services industry, and quite expensive. I'm sure there is a lot of experts in selling strategies - would love to hear opinions, thanks."

Here's my thoughts on this...

At both a macro and micro level of software architecture i.e. a business-ready solution that leverages operating systems, messaging and storage platforms, upon which a variety of applications exist to an individual software component perhaps on a chip; the issue is one of 'software that just works' and 'software that needs help'.

Whatever software you use you make choices at what point you enter the architecture and how you build upon and beneath the various intermingling layers, it's more a 3D ecosystem than a vertical 2D stack nowadays.

At each juncture where one software depends on another the risks involved are based on maintainability, resilience, security, scalability, interoperability and its measure of being fit-for-purpose.

Around these arguments one would be able to align a business strategy that compliments the resource required to achieve a successful solution - such requirements will involve capacity, expertise and knowledge.

Knowledge is fast becoming a commodity, open standards are driving integration. What is not a commodity is 'time' - so the pros/cons of selling cheap/free software and raising revenue through a support model must meet the value of 'time' the approach brings to the customer.

If your solution costs less time to develop, deploy, manage, integrate, evolve and the overall lifecycle cost is competitive - then the proposition is able to stand up against any other proposition - at this point the customer should have a clear understanding of the cost/requirements & benefit/deliverables and be able to identify the value that can be created/saved through implementation.

The most compelling aspect of using free and open source software is the speed of evolution - software is released more frequently, more often - successful open source projects have thousands of expert developers participating to test, use and improve usability, functionality, design etc..

Already open source projects on both proprietary and non-proprietary operating systems have free automated testing tools that have improved software development lifecycles which means more people are writing better software - as well as the impact of free peer-group knowledge sharing that is taking place on the internet.

Moving your value proposition from product to service will mean you will need to be aware of all these aspects in order to provide a solution that competes with the rest of the marketplace - therefore smaller open source projects are at risk of being inferior to proprietary solutions and would be dangerous to rely upon.

A blended approach is to build proprietary expert tools that leverage and integrate with open source and proprietary software that are faster, better and superior to any current software available - a variety of business models exist to facilitate how this can be executed.

Update:

Check out this product from Sourcefire which is an example of a blended proposition.

Java set free

Ed Daniel — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 12:48:00 GMT

This is quite a milestone for the IT industry and community as a whole. Big pay-off too for those who have been betting on this move.

After countless pressure from various quarters - notably IBM - SUN will now fulfil its promise made by their new CEO, Jonathan Schwarz - to release Java under GPL.

One thing I've not yet checked is whether the JVM is also being released under GPL - that would be icing on the cake for many eager software engineers out there!

More here.

I wonder if Mono will maintain an interest in the community now that this has occurred.

What will IBM do now that they've got what they wanted?

Who else cares?

Above are some of the thoughts going through my head right now.

UPDATE 18/5/07:

Does Sun's open-sourcing of Java have an impact on the way Google views Java as a development platform?

"It doesn't change how we're looking at it, but it does increase the utility of Java for us. So before they had released Java as GPL, we had signed a source code agreement with them where we could give them patches and bugs and all this other stuff—because we have a lot of fairly advanced Java development going on at the company. We have folks like Joshua Bloch working for us and he's a very prominent Java developer and he's involved in the Java Community Process very heavily.

So we always had a way of getting patches in and some features developed. So that was fine for us. But with it being open source, it's actually better for us in a lot of ways, because we can access certain parts of the code in ways we couldn't before. And we can fix them and offer those fixes up without as much ceremony around submitting those patches and features. We can say, OK, it's an open-source project so we can just release this stuff. That's incredibly freeing for us. So we were very happy to see them go GPL there."

Mueller's "No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union" now available

Ed Daniel — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 12:57:00 GMT

Florian Mueller, the founder of the award-winning NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has published his memoir-style book, "No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union", on the Internet.

On 377 pages, Mueller tells the story of the legislative process that ended in July last year with a landslide vote of the European Parliament against a proposal for a software patent directive.

This is an excerpt from the introduciton to the book by Florian Mueller, chronicling the events leading up to one of the most siginificant legislative decisions in European law this decade and of immense impact to our industry.

"On July 6, 2005, the world of politics turned upside down. Big money was dealt a blow.

The European Parliament threw out legislation that the world's largest IT companies badly wanted. Under the pretext of protecting inventors against plagiarists, it would have handed those giants sweeping powers over Europe's high-tech markets. An electronic roll-call vote thwarted the wicked plan in a matter of seconds, but that decision was preceded by years of intense fighting."

Readers of this blog will be aware I follow this - I'll never forget that later that day following my post to the blog we suffered the london bomb attack and lost Colin Morley.

Anyhow, I highly recommend you read this book.