dimanche 14 décembre 2003

Value and Values, Part 1 of 42 Recently I've settled on "Value and Values" as the open source sales pitch. This targets particular groups that are attuned to our story: people that don't have 300k in their capital budget, and people unwilling to transfer money to American shareholders to begin a relationship of dependency. The "value" part tries to tackle the paradox of free: how do small businesses make money? First, we have to change the argument from "free" to "value". This article applies an important lesson to the value of technology in a political campaign and revisits the classic business idea of "transaction cost". Lately I've promoted the idea of making software such as Plone and Silva more usable as ready-to-go products. This introduces worries about eliminating the need for consulting. I have a list of counter-arguments on this point, and this article provides one of them. The prospects with money generally don't want a framework-only answer. They want a problem solved and don't want to be left holding the bag on a pile of glue owned only by them. Without something more like a product, we can't reach them. Once we do reach them, though, won't they forgo a relationship, since the software is ready-to-go? My answer is no, because the transaction cost is still too high. They will spend more time learning and customizing than they would bringing in the experts and expertise. That's part of why big integrators make more money off commercial CMS "products" than they do off open source "frameworks". 2:48:36 PM   comment []