At 00:22 09/02/2001 +0000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
>> I've been more or less following the AxKit CVS and saw a few things about
>> AxKit-CMS. Nice looking new site. Would you care to expand on what your
>> plans are ? It seems as if you haven'y really launched yet, but it's been
>> looking as if you've been having something in the back of your mind for
>> months :)
>
>Its slowly coming along, so I put up the page to see if there was
>interest. I guess I'll see if I get commercial enquiries or not. I'm still
>unsure about the whole open source "Make money off
>consultancy/support" model of business, since its a headcount game, and I
>may just commercialise it, but I don't want to if I can help it.
I nearly sent an enquiry then I remembered that I was on the because of
something I read on the list so I thought I'd post here. I guess you could
count that as one :)
The open source + consultancy model is tricky, and I think that the devil's
in the details. My company's been providing mostly open source solutions
(the "mostly" is because over time we've developped stuff that hasn't been
released, but will be as I progressively un-ad hoc it) for four years and
we're doing well. In those four years it happened a few times that some
customers decided that it would be a better investment for them if they
employed their own techs to build upon what we'd made for them instead of
turning to us for that but we've found that to be a marginal case, and even
then those customers still turn to us for the bits they don't think their
techs can handle as well. It's a different model (we customize and
integrate more than we actually produce) but it bears a relationship. We
certainly never felt we had to try to encrypt the code we provided to our
customers or to documentation-starve them in order to force them to stay
with us.
I think there's a line between support and consultancy that can make a
difference. If the product you supply is very end-user orientated then
you'll need to supply more support than consultancy, and that will cost you
a lot in customer service if you want to do it in a way that will satisfy
your consumers. Support can be sold only for so much, so you'll need to be
sure that your product will be used by many people for it to be profitable.
That angle only works imho for very generic and widespread tools (eg
linux). For those products, either giving up the idea of making money from
the project entirely or going shareware and assimilated is probably best.
If on the other it is a less used product that will more likely be bought
by IT departments instead of simple end users, then consulting + open
source works imho. The way to see it I think is that open source has a
value which IT people will try to gauge against the value (in terms of
money) at which another closed source project in the same sector is
selling. If you try to go commercial in such areas, you'll have basically
two levels of pricing. The first one is more or less as high as the big
players in your field, in which case you'll need to have all the sales and
marketing and advertising people to go with it. Possible, but it's a bet
and it would take some serious VC. Or target the lower end pricing. In that
case you'll have to deal with the fact that people instictively think
cheaper = lesser, which is always a problem. And where people think beyond
that (which is rare) you'll face the buy this commercial software and
that's it vs use this open source software and invest the money in some
consulting conundrum, the outcome of which at that price level is often to
go for the latter (in my experience). If you're not going to go the big CMS
player route straight away, then I think Open Source + consulting is a more
viable model than pure commercial (ie it'll be more successful and make
more money).
I've talked for longer than I expected. This brings up something I've been
thinking of for some time. I've been wondering a while if some sort of
"modperl for professionals" (very bad name, I know) list would be of
interest to the community. I know that most people on the list that use
modperl are "professionals" (hence the fact that it is a bad name) but some
of us use it internally (to produce a project that is a company project)
while others sell modperl based solutions to others (creating the dynamic
backend for someone else's project). That latter group could have things to
share that are not technical and not just advocacy (or are too specific for
it). Maybe I'm not the only one wondering which is the best way to sell a
modperl solution based 100% on open source stuff to a company. On the other
hand, yet another mailing list might not be the solution.
-- robin b.
Forty two.
