On Mar 20, 2007, at 2:16 AM, Ian McNulty wrote:
For the full Goldman story see http://www.davidgoldman-sage.com/ Entrepenuer_Resume.htmAnd the moral of the tale (apart from the perils of not listening to your father's advice?Well, a couple of quotes from the Goldman story stand out:Even in these early days he was driven by customer needs. “TheCustomer is King” was the title of a large and colourful poster ofa Lion behind his desk.From the outset the emphasis of the company was on marketing - being driven by the needs of the customer rather than the technology. In fact David said, “Sage is a marketing company that happens to sell software.” Branding was everything to the fledgling company, and everything was done in order to create and then strengthen the Sage brand. This approach allowed Sagesoft, as it was by this stage, to achieve market dominance, overtaking their competitors, all of whom already had products selling in the market place.Put that in your pipe and smoke it, as my Dad used to say :)
This is an interesting point of view. As I read this what struck me was that OFBiz may not be a "marketing company", but being a user- driven open source project everything that goes into the project and survives over time is very much need based. These days I'd say around 90% of the effort that goes into OFBiz is for a specific user need, and the remaining 10% indirectly meets a user need.
The most spectacular failures in the project so far have been the speculative ones that didn't end up meeting a client need (of course the whole project was somewhat speculative initially). Some of these things may eventually see a growth in attention, but for now the Entity Code Generator is definitely dead code and the OFBiz Workflow Engine is mostly dead, and of course hundreds of thousands of lines of other code has been thrown away, usually because of replacement, but sometimes because it never met the intended need.
-David
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