Today while driving to work, I was listening to my podcast (off course) and got to think about the future and the impact opensource will have or maybe already even has on the business. Because opensource means free in many different forms, I’ll point out that I mean free as in no license fees.
Well I know from my former Job that a lot of the deals we made were because we were cheaper than our competitors. But that didn’t mean we were cheaper work forces, no mostly it meant that our sales guy did a good job getting the license fees down. Yeah, why else would you need a sales, right 😀
Well if more and more applications become opensource (and that’s the way we’re evolving imho) those tricks, won’t cut it any more. We will then have to persuide the customer off our skills and show them why we are better than our competitors or tell them why they should pay us more. I think that’s the way business should be done, now-a-days to many products get sold because their marketing team is better not because their product is better. Somebody once told me Oracle runs best on powerpoint. Now I can’t say to much about oracle because I don’t have that much knowledge about competitors in the same league. Mysql is nice, but you can’t compare it to Oracle (but version 5 is coming close).
Prolly the future isn’t going to be as black and white as I see it, but I hope it will change more to what I described here. I’m not saying everything should be opensource either, I’m just saying clients should have the best person for the job. If somebody’s better than you and asks the same price for his services, he should get it. If you get the job because you cut a better deal with the reseller that’s not right in my eyes, but then again I’m no suit.