[room] Alfresco: "софт должен продавать себя сам"

[Michael Shigorin]

	Здравствуйте.
Довольно интересное (хоть и бурно разбавленная "you know
what") интервью с мужиком из Alfresco насчёт различных моделей
продажи в том числе (по ходу обсуждения выводов из их опроса
своих клиентов и наблюдения за разными случаями их появления):

http://www.linuxworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x_linux.cgi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/linuxworld/news/2007/081607-matt-asay-interview.html

"...lot of companies evaluating on Windows, because that happens
to be what is sitting on the developer's desktop. But then going
live and going into production with Linux, that's very consistent
across the board with every open source company with which I'm
familiar. And then this affinity for other open source pieces of
the infrastructure that go with your open source application
again. I see this in all the companies that I talk to."

"But generally speaking, the software has to sell itself. We
don't have anybody out knocking on doors trying to drum up
business. All leads come to us. And it means the software really
has to be good and has to stand on its own. It has to be easy to
install, easy to understand. Documentation has to be good. We
have to be able to get the customer off the ground without our
assistance, and then we come in to provide that extra value to
make sure that they get the most out of the software. But it's
very different from the proprietary model where you hire an
expensive sales force to go out and knock on doors. The customer
never gets to touch the software and really see what it can do
and whether it will be good for them until they've paid. So all
the risk gets shifted onto the buyer, which is, I think, a wrong
model. Depending on the day I might even go so far as to say an
immoral model of how to do business. But I'm somewhat biased in
matters like that, so take that with a grain of salt."

"...I think, it's better for customers to buy into a model that
says you know what, you paid zero for the software--you find out
on your own whether it's going to work for you or not, and if you
buy, you're buying support, or you're buying some extra value
that we're providing."

"In the software world we don't like the thought of having to
really break our backs for the customer, but that's what we
should be doing. That's what virtually every industry on the
planet has to do. You have to serve the customer, and software
has gotten a free ride for too long in my opinion."

"One of the problems with open source is that suddenly your
customers know a heck of a lot about your product and you can't
BS anymore. You have to train the sales people to just be very
candid about what the product can and can't do because the
customer will find out really quickly if you're lying. ...
I think it means you need to have more of these solutions
engineers or sales engineers than you do of sales people."

И там ещё в конце менее релевантный, но интересный цифрами
рассказ о переезде модели лицензирования

* с 80% MPL+attribution / 20% proprietary на 100% MPL+attribution;
* потом на GPLv2

в мотивации и результатах (второй шаг добавил 50% продаж).

PS: кто угодил в Bcc: -- просьба не удивляться. :)

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike на altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/