Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 10:19:34 +0000 From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk> Bob Young wrote: > Whether or not your product actually is more reliable or higher value > than the alternatives available in the market is besides the > point. Customers will buy -more- warranties from you for the higher > quality software you sell - if, and only if, you can convince them that > you are a more reliable supplier of solutions to their business > problems than your competitors. This reminds me of a rather depressing study done by (I think) IDC in the early 80s that aimed to find out what was correlated to software market penetration. The only factor with any significance was marketing budget. I'm not sure why this is depressing, or, for that matter, surprising. The experience of Linux, gcc, Apache, sendmail, bind, etc., shows that a superior solution can achieve good market penetration with zero marketing budget. When the available solutions are more or less equivalent--as appears to be the case among, say, spreadsheets or word processing programs or Linux distributions--then marketing is the main determining factor. In a fantasy world of perfect markets and perfect information, this would not be the case. But in the real world, choosing among competing alternatives means investing just enough time to learn which alternative will do the job. Since for most people software is a tool to achieve other ends, rather than an end in itself, most people just confirm that one of the software packages they know about will work for them. Which software packages they know about is a function of marketing budget. Another way to put this today is: don't go head to head against Microsoft. Or, unlike most cliches, ``build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door'' is simply false. The sucessful zero-marketing packages listed above share a couple of other characteristics: they all have gratis distribution, and they are all selected by people who tend to know a great deal about software or system administration (compare to selecting a word processor). For a free software package to be widely chosen as a tool by people who do not care about software, good marketing is required. This is what Red Hat is presumably trying to do to push a desktop version of Linux. I do optimistically believe that superior products tend to win out over time. But the victory can take several years or even decades (network effects in particular can ensure a long lifetime for inferiority). And the victory can take the form of the dominant products adopting the superior features, with no monetary reward for the people who introduced those features. Ian