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2007-09-27 Mediocre Software

Reading one of the latest excellent post from Paul Graham, I found this interesting part about the conservatism of large corporation when purchasing software :

There used to be a saying in the corporate world: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." You no longer hear this about IBM specifically, but the idea is very much alive; there is a whole category of "enterprise" software companies that exist to take advantage of it. People buying technology for large organizations don't care if they pay a fortune for mediocre software. It's not their money. They just want to buy from a supplier who seems safe—a company with an established name, confident salesmen, impressive offices, and software that conforms to all the current fashions. Not necessarily a company that will deliver so much as one that, if they do let you down, will still seem to have been a prudent choice. So companies have evolved to fill that niche.

Reading between the line, if you run a startup and you have an excellent software that you want to sell to a large corporation. You'll need to do the following :

By doing so, you'll move your excellent software to just mediocre software chosen by large corporation (as you are not anymore focusing on the software but just its general packaging). A big dilemma…

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