I love you guys!!!! Keep up the good fight!!!!

duane

My posting rate has been abysmal for the past week or so, both here and on my other blog. Here, dear readers, is a formal apology. I’ve been drinking from the RedMonk firehose, and there hasn’t been much chance to…

My background is in consultancy, which is essentially a resource-constrained business. Like it or lump it, utilisation, aka “bums on seats”, is a (the?) major measure of success in a human-constrained, consultancy only based model. It becomes very difficult to get very rich out of being a consultant. Sure, you can put your rates up so that you can become quite well off as an individual; alternatively you can own a consultancy company – the consultants get paid, you get the profits. Either way, you are ultimately resource constrained.

A second way of making money is on a per-license basis. In this way, having produced a creative work, the only limitation is based on the number of people that want to buy it. While it is a perfectly valid approach to release information and reports for nothing (indeed we do it too), it is equally valid to want to gain revenue for a work. Ask any musician. If you choose not to, that’s fair enough, but just because you don’t want to charge, that doesn’t mean people aren’t prepared to pay.

Couldn’t agree more with the assessment of Analyst Business As It Is Done Now. I’ve monitored the analyst firm predictions for the past decade or so in my specialities (data warehousing, EAI, now SOA) and they haven’t been right yet. Add to that the pay-to-play aspect, and it’s all just a kind of expensive game.

I still don’t see how anyone outside of an elite few can make a living from open-source coding (or analysis Before the handover of their database to MySQL, SAP had a hundred developers on staff for an open-source database. The rationale was that it was a way for their customers to avoid paying the Oracle premium, so it supported their business. That made sense, but I wonder where those developers are now ?

Lovely. What the hell were you going on about in the first bit though?

Love n Hugs, G

OK piece, I thought. Although you could have expressed your idea in 50 words!

Love n Hugs, G

I am amazed that people continue to ask the “but how will you make money?” question.

Key concepts for me are that clients do not buy you “thoughts”, they invest in your “capacity to think” and that chemistry between supplier and client is getting more and more important. I just did a bit of supplier selection consulting – clearly, we were not buying what the suppliers had done, but what they had the potential to do for the project in future.

Chemistry was so important in that process. The buyer was not buying a design (or heaven forbid a “solution”) from the supplier, not even “design services” in isolation. They were setting up a relationship, into which both sides will put creativity and technical knowledge, out of which an end product will come. And open source stuff was what convinced the buyer about which relationship to continue.

Sure you won’t make money off the CC stuff directly, but putting your stuff out there, open source, is a celebration of what it is you do and a sign of your understanding of the how business is moving right now. It’s a sign of your confidence in yourself, in your capacity to do great work in the future. That has to have an appeal to clients. And open source is rooted in relationships, which is what I think forward thinking clients want.

That kind of thinking appears to work. I saw a survey which suggested that programmers who have contributed to open source projects earn 20% more than those who haven’t. Oh, there is evidence to the contrary, too. Someone did a PhD in which they worked out that senior businessmen and women have historically placed more stock in the advice they pay for than advice that comes free, even if the paid for advice is a clearly inferior.

I don’t know much about the business model for an analyst firm. (I thought they just wined and dined around the world then magically turned those events into saleable material.) But I know the closed source model is dying, so what choice have you got? Go forward with the throttle ‘wide open.’ (The more you open it up the faster you will go.) When you get there look back and give the rest of us directions.