Thursday, April 5, 2007
Open Source Market: OpenLogic’s CEO unveils new trends
Open Source Market: OpenLogic’s CEO unveils new trends
by Roberto Galoppini, April 5, 2007
Steven L. Grandchamp, OpenLogic’s CEO, has written an insightful article entitled “The Evolution of Open Source”, explaining that there are many sourcing and selection issues and how this market is evolving.
Roberto discusses Steven's article in this blog post and also provides his perspectives on the trends.
One quote that I'd like to carry from this post, "The real opportunity for growth is in demystifying the use of open source. Those third-party, open source firms that focus on helping enterprises develop policies, pick projects, and manage deployments are the ones most likely to succeed and excel." Similar to what Roberto says, I'm not sure if these horizontal business models are more likely to succeed (I hope this indeed is what Roberto has meant by his term "horizontal" business models!), but I can see a distinct value addition and a distinct avenue of making serious money as well in this model!
See the full post here
by Roberto Galoppini, April 5, 2007
Steven L. Grandchamp, OpenLogic’s CEO, has written an insightful article entitled “The Evolution of Open Source”, explaining that there are many sourcing and selection issues and how this market is evolving.
Roberto discusses Steven's article in this blog post and also provides his perspectives on the trends.
One quote that I'd like to carry from this post, "The real opportunity for growth is in demystifying the use of open source. Those third-party, open source firms that focus on helping enterprises develop policies, pick projects, and manage deployments are the ones most likely to succeed and excel." Similar to what Roberto says, I'm not sure if these horizontal business models are more likely to succeed (I hope this indeed is what Roberto has meant by his term "horizontal" business models!), but I can see a distinct value addition and a distinct avenue of making serious money as well in this model!
See the full post here
Labels: business-models, perspectives, trends
The theory of Twitter & of social imbalances
The theory of Twitter & of social imbalances
April 05, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Dave in this post expands on a notion that he had discussed about Twitter's change of subscription policies.
Well, from what I understand, he essentially is trying to analyse whether systems can be entirely democratic in their decision-making processes (in the piece he had written about on Twitter's policies, the system was not fully democratic). Dave feels that social systems could be perceived as being in one of the two sets - balanced and imbalanced systems. Balanced systems are perceived to be democratic and fair, and the imbalanced ones are not, put crudely.
Imbalances continue happening in social systems, and so they will in Twitter, predicts Dave - somewhat on the lines of the evolution of the A-list bloggers...but is this "imbalance" a problem? Quite on the contrary, feels Dave. Such an imbalance could be quite necessary for these systems to function, similar to similar imbalances being necessary for efficient decision making in companies (at least medium and large companies).
One can easily see the relevance of this discussion to many open source projects, and we have already heard of quite a few open source project leaders being called "dictators" at least in a humorous sense (but perhaps not always meant lightly!). But unless there exist such (hopefully) benevolent dictatorships, would the world ever see the likes of more Linuxes and Phps and Apaches? If two's company and three a crowd, just imagine what combined decision-making by dozens of geeky and strong-minded developers would add to :-). A word pops in my mind - pandemonium.
Interesting post, read the full post here @ Scripting blog
April 05, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Dave in this post expands on a notion that he had discussed about Twitter's change of subscription policies.
Well, from what I understand, he essentially is trying to analyse whether systems can be entirely democratic in their decision-making processes (in the piece he had written about on Twitter's policies, the system was not fully democratic). Dave feels that social systems could be perceived as being in one of the two sets - balanced and imbalanced systems. Balanced systems are perceived to be democratic and fair, and the imbalanced ones are not, put crudely.
Imbalances continue happening in social systems, and so they will in Twitter, predicts Dave - somewhat on the lines of the evolution of the A-list bloggers...but is this "imbalance" a problem? Quite on the contrary, feels Dave. Such an imbalance could be quite necessary for these systems to function, similar to similar imbalances being necessary for efficient decision making in companies (at least medium and large companies).
One can easily see the relevance of this discussion to many open source projects, and we have already heard of quite a few open source project leaders being called "dictators" at least in a humorous sense (but perhaps not always meant lightly!). But unless there exist such (hopefully) benevolent dictatorships, would the world ever see the likes of more Linuxes and Phps and Apaches? If two's company and three a crowd, just imagine what combined decision-making by dozens of geeky and strong-minded developers would add to :-). A word pops in my mind - pandemonium.
Interesting post, read the full post here @ Scripting blog
Labels: analysis, perspectives, problems, project-management, social-networking
Open source mechanics: Compensating renewals, hiring inside sales
Open source mechanics: Comp'ing renewals, hiring inside sales
April 05, 2007
The author (Matt Asay), in the middle of finalizing his company's (Alfresco) sales compensation plan for their open source software, realises that it is not as easy as putting down commissions and incentives based on sales...
The core of the issue had to do with how to compensate for renewals. After some thought, Matt opted to fully compensate and credit renewals. Why? Because it aligns interests between the salesperson and the customer.
Dwelling on these issues, Matt extends these thought processes and provides some interesting perspectives. One of them is a quote from his CEO:"Software is simply an excuse for a business relationship." That is, in the case of open source software, the bits are simply an excuse to provide service to a customer.
Once you see sales from this relationship and support perspective, it is not surprising that folks decide to incentivise salespeople on renewals as well. Because, to quote Matt, "Because as an open source company selling subscriptions to services, those subscriptions end the minute I stop providing value." And so will renewals!
Interesting post, read the full post from here @ Open Sources
April 05, 2007
The author (Matt Asay), in the middle of finalizing his company's (Alfresco) sales compensation plan for their open source software, realises that it is not as easy as putting down commissions and incentives based on sales...
The core of the issue had to do with how to compensate for renewals. After some thought, Matt opted to fully compensate and credit renewals. Why? Because it aligns interests between the salesperson and the customer.
Dwelling on these issues, Matt extends these thought processes and provides some interesting perspectives. One of them is a quote from his CEO:"Software is simply an excuse for a business relationship." That is, in the case of open source software, the bits are simply an excuse to provide service to a customer.
Once you see sales from this relationship and support perspective, it is not surprising that folks decide to incentivise salespeople on renewals as well. Because, to quote Matt, "Because as an open source company selling subscriptions to services, those subscriptions end the minute I stop providing value." And so will renewals!
Interesting post, read the full post from here @ Open Sources
Labels: analysis, customer-service, perspectives, sales
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