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Re: filtering for expensive customers?
by La Monte Henry Piggy Yarroll
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Federico Lucifredi wrote:
> Hello All,
> I have recently struck a reflection that I consider interesting:
>
> Postulate: Market analysts tell us that the #1 competitor to F/OSS
> companies is internal expertise at the customer site: in short, if the
> local crew is smart and attuned with the state of the software they
> want to deploy, possibly even maintaining ties to the relevant part of
> the community, they will deploy and support said software themselves.
> Vendors might come in (much) later, and only because of a need to
> blame-shift in very large/critical deployments (or in the mind of a
> new director of IT operations ;-)
>
> Given the premise above, it looks like more often than not F/OSS
> vendors are vying for the business of the customers who do *not* have
> sufficient on-site expertise - in other words, it looks like one might
> be selecting customers coming from the most clueless part of the pool!I might contest the premise that only the most clueless seek
professional help. I have two anecdotal counter-examples.
Very early in my career I had a consulting client who frequently asked
me questions about his software which were readily answered in the
documentation. When I pointed this out to him, he explained that it was
much more cost-effective for him to pay ME to read the documentation and
then provide him with exactly the information he needed. He was an
extremely literate person. He knew how much effort it was to digest a
whole manual. He chose not to.
The other example is very recent.
Until recently I worked for a small company that provides services for
building custom Linux distros. The vast majority of our customers were
people who HAD built their own distros and were now ready to build more.
They KNEW what a pain it was. It was worth it to them to pay for access
to our automation infrastructure and distribution engineers.
The best salesman for open source service businesses is in-house expertise.
>
> Why is this an F/OSS concern? Well, we all know that, in general,
> engineers like to think that "customers suck", but this thinking
> pushes it to a new level: while in the proprietary market, all
> customers must purchase support from you, in our brave new world, only
> the less clueful need to. Besides the inherent higher stress this
> places on the support crew, this is also expensive from a business
> perspective - the ideal support customers are, obviously, the ones who
> never need it.
Customers who never need your support don't generally renew. The ideal
customer from a business perspective puts less load on your support
staff than their subscription covers.
In an open source market, the customer is often looking at the same
source you are looking at. I can't tell you how fabulous this is from
the perspective of the support crew.
> Am I wondering about the obvious? Perhaps I am being too
> pessimistic. But if you accept the postulate, the thesis seems to follow.
My empirical experience is that the most clueful customers I've ever had
were those paying for open source support. This suggests that there is
some defect in either the postulate or the thesis...
> Hello All,
> I have recently struck a reflection that I consider interesting:
>
> Postulate: Market analysts tell us that the #1 competitor to F/OSS
> companies is internal expertise at the customer site: in short, if the
> local crew is smart and attuned with the state of the software they
> want to deploy, possibly even maintaining ties to the relevant part of
> the community, they will deploy and support said software themselves.
> Vendors might come in (much) later, and only because of a need to
> blame-shift in very large/critical deployments (or in the mind of a
> new director of IT operations ;-)
>
> Given the premise above, it looks like more often than not F/OSS
> vendors are vying for the business of the customers who do *not* have
> sufficient on-site expertise - in other words, it looks like one might
> be selecting customers coming from the most clueless part of the pool!
professional help. I have two anecdotal counter-examples.
Very early in my career I had a consulting client who frequently asked
me questions about his software which were readily answered in the
documentation. When I pointed this out to him, he explained that it was
much more cost-effective for him to pay ME to read the documentation and
then provide him with exactly the information he needed. He was an
extremely literate person. He knew how much effort it was to digest a
whole manual. He chose not to.
The other example is very recent.
Until recently I worked for a small company that provides services for
building custom Linux distros. The vast majority of our customers were
people who HAD built their own distros and were now ready to build more.
They KNEW what a pain it was. It was worth it to them to pay for access
to our automation infrastructure and distribution engineers.
The best salesman for open source service businesses is in-house expertise.
>
> Why is this an F/OSS concern? Well, we all know that, in general,
> engineers like to think that "customers suck", but this thinking
> pushes it to a new level: while in the proprietary market, all
> customers must purchase support from you, in our brave new world, only
> the less clueful need to. Besides the inherent higher stress this
> places on the support crew, this is also expensive from a business
> perspective - the ideal support customers are, obviously, the ones who
> never need it.
Customers who never need your support don't generally renew. The ideal
customer from a business perspective puts less load on your support
staff than their subscription covers.
In an open source market, the customer is often looking at the same
source you are looking at. I can't tell you how fabulous this is from
the perspective of the support crew.
> Am I wondering about the obvious? Perhaps I am being too
> pessimistic. But if you accept the postulate, the thesis seems to follow.
My empirical experience is that the most clueful customers I've ever had
were those paying for open source support. This suggests that there is
some defect in either the postulate or the thesis...
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