Defining competition within open-source companies
In talking with my PR firm (Page One) the other day, it struck me that many open-source companies fritter away far too much attention and time competing with...themselves. That is, they talk about how they're better than another open-source company or project.
Why? This isn't about keeping the faith with "the family," but rather about market realities: to beat a fellow open-source company or project is like winning the third-grade's sack race. It might feel good, but it makes no appreciable difference on the world. Beating a string of underdogs won't matter one iota compared to beating the top dogs.
Hyperic's target is the Big Four of IT management, not the Little Four. MuleSource should be focused on Tibco, not ServiceMix. SugarCRM is after Siebel and Salesforce.com, not vTiger. OpenBravo offers a new approach to ERP that SAP and Oracle can't easily replicate - it should not be focused on Compiere, Adempiere, or other open-source ERP projects.
To "win" against such competition is to lose the larger market battles, if that's all a company does. The real prize is market domination, and that necessarily comes at the expense of the proprietary incumbents, and not necessarily on the back of open-source competition.
At Alfresco, I can't remember the last time my sales team competed on a deal with an open-source competitor. Here in the US, it has possibly happened once, but I honestly can't remember a single time. In part this is how we define ourselves and how we define our competition. Our competition is the widespread dearth of content-management adoption as well as the wasteful inefficiencies of the proprietary incumbent vendors. In turn, our customers and prospective customers compare us to the big incumbents, where we compete exceptionally well.
If you're an open-source company, stop wasting marketing dollars and sleepless nights about your downloads compared to an open-source "competitor's" downloads. Instead, compare yourself to the large, proprietary vendors that are wasting your prospective customers' money, time, and patience.
Open-source companies need to set their sights higher. We can't afford to compete among ourselves when the real opportunity is in overcoming non-use of technology (due to cost, complexity, etc.) and the waste that comes from proprietary vendors.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/07/
on_competition.html
As for this post, I absolutely agree with not focusing on the downloads. Focus on the customers, deployments and overall relevancy of your software. It has to be a relevant, real solution for you to be successful - open source or otherwise. Downloads and all the hype that comes with it is pretty empty without customers.
As for what competition to focus on - I think any business worth its salt keeps a close eye on all of it. In Hyperic's case, we absolutely watch the Big 4 right along with any other real player in the enterprise systems management space. That said, in our particular case, while we watch the Big 4, we aren't really competing with them. We are solving a new breed of sys mgmt problem - for online services, complex websites that would never consider using antiquated, cumbersome and brittle (not to mention expensive) systems from the traditional vendors. We actually compete more often than not with custom built systems than other packages.
That said, just because we're solving something new doesn't mean we can't learn from others in the market big or small. And our absolute goal is to dominate the market that we address. That means if any of the Big 4 decide to build something in our space, we plan to compete and deliver better software than any of them. I am obviously biased, but I think we're proving ourselves pretty well in that regard and don't plan to ease up anytime soon!
Open Source projects, on the other hand, have historically been about building a strong community; with enough of the varies skills necessary to delivery the whole.
Community, I would argue, is what defines an Open Source project. It's the word of mouth marketing, it's the 24/7 multilingual support in a worldwide market, it's the innovation that comes from seeing the world from so many varied perspectives, it's the QA the comes from many eyeballs viewing the code and testing by using it. It is, I believe, these attributes that make Open Source powerful and it is these attributes that this new breed of ?commercial open source? enterprise hope to gain from being labeled ?open source?.
A strong community can save them a lot of money in marketing, support & QA and perhaps more importantly it is what defines them as a successful open source project and without his moniker, frankly, they simply could never dream of going head to head with the likes of SAP & Oracle as you suggest.
And while I agree with your sentiment, I would suggest that given Jakob Nielsen's 90-9-1 rule [http://i.e. that in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action|http://i.e. that in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action], perhaps the competition we witness between many open source projects is for contributing community members (to carry out the above) rather than the typical competition for customers?
colin
I agree with the posting but you seem to suggest that our sights at MuleSource are off-target. When starting MuleSource we identified our competition and none were in the open source space. We get confirmation of this every quarter when we review our sales and the competition is rarely open source. I believe this is due to two things -
- Mule has been around a lot longer than the other open source offerings and has been battle-tested in production environments for the last 4 years. it also provides the richest feature-set.
- Our sales guys are good at qualifying leads
We don't compete with the suite of tools that IBM will through at you, instead we offer a excellent alternative that gets our customers where they need to be. If you do need all the other stuff that IBM throws at you, then you should go with IBM.
Cheers,
Ross
When you meet with a client you are not there to prove why competitor X won't work. You're there to prove why you will. Period. The inverse is petty.
If you're talking about making cold calls and other traditional marketing tactics as an open source company -- you're already at a disadvantage to most open source companies that have burned those boats long ago. You're already doing a disservice to your customers -- something is up:
* distribution model stinks.
* community model is broken
* not enough transparency (of code and conduct)
As for playing to win -- yes the only way to play to win and actually win is by playing to be #1. I think you do that by focusing on the customer not the competition.
Actually, I knew I had read something like this before, but couldn't remember where. Now I know it was your brain seeping waste into mine. The best I could do with it was copy you. :-)
- open source competition
- by sanjivaw October 30, 2007 9:19 PM PDT
- Hi Matt,
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(10 Comments)I've posted some comments on the issue of open source companies competing against each other on my own blog at http://sanjiva.weerawarana.org/2007/10/open-source-business-love-fest-not.html. I don't exactly agree with you :-).
Sanjiva.