I've been hearing more and more that proprietary companies are fighting back against open-source companies by giving away their software. "We can compete with free!" they chortle as they discount their license fees to zero, occasionally winning deals (with customers who don't yet fully understand that open source is far more than price tag).
But with every deal they win on these terms, they lose. Their cost structure can't support giving away million-dollar deals that cost (literally, at times) a million dollars to close. Talking with a friend at Oracle, he tells me they expend upwards of 18 months and 100 or so people working on their million-dollar deals.
In other words, they spend money like crazy so that they can win the deal and hold onto that maintenance revenue.
... Read moreI had been wondering this lately, and so have been asking people: who are IBM's software customers? My company sells into a wide range of Global 2000 companies, but we almost never bump into IBM databases or application servers (or hardware, for that matter). I can count the number of times on two hands, yet we often run into Oracle, Microsoft, BEA Weblogic, even Sybase. Rarely IBM.
IBM is doing a ton of revenue in software sales. But to whom does it sell its software?
... Read more
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