On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 06:09:44PM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote:
|
| As for the viability of a particular market, here's an example.
| Yahoo's business section lists NVIDIA as having 1513 employees and
| revenue over the last year was $1731 Million. This is revenue of
| over $1 Million per employee per year. That 1513 includes everybody
| including secretaries, etc... so there is obviously well over a
| Million dollars revenue per engineer. One man year of extra work
| is generally expected to generate at least a Million extra dollars
| of revenue. If a particular market can't generate that, resources
| are best allocated to another project.
This is a good rule-of-thumb that everyone should keep in mind. Thanks for
presenting it so clearly.
It's important not to drive it too far, though. In particular, it's
simplified in at least two respects:
Opportunity. It may be that there *aren't* any million-dollar
per-employee revenue opportunities available in the market. If you
want to expand, you have to take the best of the opportunities that are
available, even if that means revenue-per-employee goes down.
Financials. It takes time for engineering work to be done, and more
time for a new market to be developed. So the whole effort needs to be
evaluated as an investment with return over time, not just cash-flow-in
vs. cash-flow-out.
The open source community needs to address this stuff, too, if it wants to make
a compelling business case to the vendors.
Allen
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