htulog

From a customer perspective, when looking for something to buy, the details are meaningless in front of the desired outcome. Let’s say you want a new suit. You have two options, either buy it from a shop and adapt it so it fits you or hire a tailor to make a custom one for you.  In both cases what you are looking for is the final outcome: a shiny new suit.

In the software industry is almost the same case. Customers are looking for the final outcome rather than “ingredients” (read technologies). Most tech companies fail to understand this basic business concept. I’ve seen this happening among the ones selling services like development, support or consulting. Companies tend to advertise their technologies as their selling pitch and business proposal.

The mistake is often related to the fact that technical people confuse the production tools with the final product. With the intention to differentiate among their counterparts in the industry, tech companies choose tools to help them build final products. The issue here is that for the market what’s relevant is the final product you deliver rather than what you happen to use for making it.

Brian Prentice, from the Gartner blog network, elaborates on the subject, from the opensource perspective. He correctly points out:

open source is not a value proposition in its own right.

By this he means that the sole promise of open source, or FLOSS, understood as their licensing benefits, is not a value proposition by itself for customers in order to convince them to buy it. This can be also applied to our example: tools are not a value proposition by themselves. What the customers are looking for are other aspects that offer value: better support, maintenance and lock-in conditions.

He also states, regarding the opensource landscape, that eventually the more adoption of it will make it more visible and by consequence more likely to be serious scrutinized. For that, marketers of such products will have to construct a selling value proposition that will be far from the technical details. This, of course, is also a good sign of maturity in the FLOSS ecosystem.

Back to our initial subject, companies must pay more attention to the final outcome from the customer POV than to their “production and manufacturing process and tools”, which are internal assets. So, next time you set a board meeting ask yourselves what do you sell and compare it to what customers buy from you currently and what’s important for them, and for your targeted market.

A very good example of this is the new Austin-based startup Gowalla Inc. This company sells:

free location-based travel game that lets users share where they are and track their friends as they move around.

Which happens to be build on the Ruby On Rails open source stack.