Ned, you'll limit your market
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| Author | Content |
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| tadelste Feb 09, 2006 7:16 AM EDT |
Ned, I founded a company in 1999 with a product I wanted to develop as a clone of Outlook for UNIX and Linux. We started as a pay-per-incident Linux support company. People had said you can't call anyone if you want Linux support, so I put in an 1-800 line and went to work. Still, the primary goal was to serve some customers: Intel, Boeing and Ericsson. Those large UNIX shops were in Exchange hell. We discovered numerous other shops with the same dilemma. So, we wrote a CDO proxy and gave people the opportunity to use an Outlook clone for Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc. It gave people the ability to do meeting management and to handle mail functions, etc. We had also developed a Linux solution for Exchange. I've written about this a few times in articles. We broke the wireline code and created a plugin for Outlook. It worked well. Our first client for the server: Winnebago Industries running Linux on an IBM S/390 mainframe. That created IBM's first reference account. IBM embraced us and put us into the marketing system. You would think that would have been all we needed. But it wasn't. We used OpenLDAP, Apache, Cyrus IMAP, Proftp, Pam, EXIM, etc. - all open source components. But we had investors and those guys knew N-O-T-H-I-N-G about the open source model. They saw it as a cheap way into business. They wanted me to write software patents and develop a intellectual property portfolio. So, my clients were in Exchange hell and I was in VC hell. I worked my butt off to market our product, but we never made it really BIG. I made presentations to WalMart and companies of that stature. Business partners and Blue Suits took us into the biggest and best. We did a major pilot with Merrill for example. Meanwhile, Marc Fleury over at JBoss experience overwhelming success by giving away the code, creating a robust community and making money off of training, then support. Check his market share. He's bigger than IBM now. A moral exists to this story. Don't do what you're doing, it won't work. I'm telling you, your ERP system may have a few wins, but the vision in your mind will never come to fruition. Open the code, GPL everything, create the facilities for a big developer community, sell training - implementation - support. You'll cut the legs out from under Microsoft and win the market. You potential customer base is gigantic. Do it right now and you'll only win. Of course, people say free advice is worth the price. But, not in the free software community. You're getting the benefit of someone whose had numerous successful startups. Listen to it. |
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