It's been a couple of weeks and I have been pretty tied up. The little guy busted out a tooth which was joyful yet painful (the kid can scream!). In between sleep I've been busily talking up the JBoss Portal and making our future plans.
Oh and get ready - the plans are looking sweet. More on that later. Anyone who thought our little project was dead will be pleasantly surprised.
Last week I got to talk at an Alfresco roadshow who are a great partner of ours. What was awesome about it was the excitement of a standing room only crowd. After years of doing these types of events at IBM it was refreshing to see these folks who did not wear the technology like a badge. Nobody said I'm a JBoss guy or I'm and Alfresco gal. It was just people who wanted to build great stuff. As Steve Mills himself once said "customers hate buying software, they like doing stuff with it." Sometimes that gets lost in the datasheets and prezzos from all technical vendors which is too bad.
The Alfresco crew gave me some time to rant about Value. From now on I think I will just choose one word to rant about in public presentations. Here are the cliff notes for you about value in the SW business.
1) When your business is a subscription model (Open Source, Netflix, SaaS, Any magazine or newspaper) the only way you can win is with excellent content and customer service delivered consistently period. If you don't do that all the free stuff in the world doesnt matter.
2) Open Source may be seen as a commoditizer however that is not what defines the best Open Source companies. The best ones are just the same as the other best known commoditizers (Jet Blue, Dell etc) in the fact that we focus on the customer not the commodity.
3) Customers are finally understanding that value is derived from what they want to accomplish not what comes in the box.
4) A healthy dose of respect for the customer's right to choose. In case you have not been watching things there are basically 3 SW titans and everyone else. Sadly, freedom to choose may not be a strong suit of thiers which is too bad since it is really really valuable to their customers.
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