Building a Successful Enterprise Software Company in the Microsoft Age
- The bad news: It would be nice to collect money from thousands of customers in exchange for shrink-wrapped closed-source software, packaged by prison labor. Sadly this niche is occupied by Microsoft. Don’t be fooled by survivorship bias into thinking that your company has a chance of ascending to this privileged position.
- The big question: “Why would a customer want to adopt software from any supplier other than Microsoft?”
- You can’t be richer than Microsoft or smarter than its thousands of brilliant employees; you can attack a problem that Microsoft is not attacking (and the first company to deliver a solution to a customer is the first company that can learn from watching users)
- If the problem area is new, and it probably is if Microsoft hasn’t been there already, requirements will be evolving rapidly; open-source is the best way of ensuring that requirements are met (note that “open source” need not mean “free”)
- Achieving critical mass before Microsoft kills you, Part I: educational marketing via high-level papers and books, one-day high-level courses, and multi-day bootcamps
- Achieving critical mass before Microsoft kills you, Part II: freely downloadable software, easy-to-understand software architecture, clear (not voluminous) documentation
- Key to supra-normal return on investment in a free open-source world: you control what gets added to the next version of the software, i.e., you control which customers are running a standard version of the software and can upgrade painlessly and which customers are forced into ownership of customizations.
- Consider releasing the product from a running system with real users (instead of the usual loop of users talk to marketing, marketing talks to product management, product management talks to programmers, new version gets released after 2 years and the cycle starts anew)
Resource:
1- http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/short-talks
