NOW: paradigm shift

[GCC Consulting]

Top post:

We as developers sell time.  Time may be the form of an application; time
may be in the form of consulting (advise); time may be .....

The one truism I have learned over the years is that "time" is not valued by
some as much as a physical product.  

Now time is not just seconds/minutes ticking off on a clock.  Time is our
accumulated knowledge and our ability to apply that knowledge. 

You log into a client's system or arrive there to correct a problem.  You
take care of it with relative ease as you have seen the problem before or
are aware of how to correct the problem.  You render a bill for your
service.  Many times, your client really has no idea of what it took to
correct the problem.  He gets your bill and complains, "you were here for
only xxx, why is you bill so high?"

Now you must support the reason for billing them the amount you did.  If you
had delivered a widget to him and told him it would cost xxx, he most likely
would have accepted the price as it is a tangible object that can be seen
and touched.

I'll relate a personal situation which happened to me many years ago. I had
a friend as a client and had written software for his lace and embroidery
business.  His partner always questioned by bills and after a while I
decided that I could no longer afford to have them as an account.  As I had
licensed the application I had written using filePro, when they wanted some
additional programming, they went to small computer and contracted for a
programmer.  I gave them a release to have this person modify my code which
was on their system.

I had not been in their office for over a year and while the programmer from
small computer was there, the computer crashed.  Tandy Model 16 Xenix with a
35Mb hard drive and a Bernoulli box for backup.  My friends partner blamed
me for the crash.  I explained that their secretary had specific
instructions for backing up the system each night on her bulletin board.

They called me in to see if I could recover their data.  This was just
before Thanksgiving.  I worked through Wednesday night and had an agreement
that a check would be there for me on Friday when I arrived to finish up the
job.  Well, there was no check.  I called my "friend" at home and asked him
where my check was.  He said his partner didn't want to pay me as he felt it
was my fault and his brother told him it was an easy job to recover the
data.

My answer to him at that point was to have his partner come in and recover
the data himself.  My friend came in a cut me a check in the agreed upon
amount. We used the same bank so I deposited it immediately.

I was able to get back most of his costing file, about 2000 of 2400 items.
I could have recovered all of his billing information but was annoyed enough
to only restore billing through the end of March of that year.  His billing
clerk had to rekey all of the missing items.

We all have had incidents like this or something similar.

We may not agree with fptech's licensing but to some extent it is protecting
our work product.  How would or do you feel when you find out someone has
copied your application and is using it without paying you for it?  I had
this happen with my first major application.  I quickly wrote in code to
incapacitate the software if it was moved off the original machine it was
installed on. 

So, why is fptech or any other software company different?  Now I may differ
on how the license is implemented, i.e. sessions rather the seats, and some
other items, but they do have a right to insure that their software is not
pirated.  Just like we need cash flow from our work product, so do they.

Richard Kreiss
GCC Consulting
   
 

Our ime and softeware

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> filepro-list-bounces+gccconsulting=comcast.net at lists.celestial
> .com 
> [mailto:filepro-list-bounces+gccconsulting=comcast.net at lists.c
> elestial.com] On Behalf Of Ron Kracht
> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 4:57 PM
> To: Walter Vaughan
> Cc: filePro
> Subject: Re: NOW: paradigm shift
> 
> Walter Vaughan wrote:
> > Ron Kracht wrote:
> >
> >   
> >> You do not correctly understand.
> >>     
> >
> > I think the paradigm shift is that some people are quite 
> comfortable 
> > with paying for support contracts but are unwilling to continue 
> > treating and paying for a pattern of bits on a disk as if they are 
> > physical objects that consume space with a relation between 
> consumption and cost to deliver.
> >   
> I recognize that thinking exists and that it affect perceived 
> value, I'm just not sure it's always valid outside of mass 
> consumer markets - especially in the case of a tool that 
> allows you to earn/save money.  If that person is making or 
> saving money using a software tool that someone else created 
> is that significantly different than any physical tool.  
> The equation is still the same, is the tool worth the cost?  
> Both 'worth' and 'cost' can mean different things to 
> different people. One person may calculate worth simply as 
> 'how much income I can generate in a given period of time' 
> another person might factor in availability of support, 
> timing of bug fixes, priorities given to special needs, 
> reliability of the toolmaker, availability of source code, 
> cost of other comparable tools, or a number of other factors. 
>  The same thing is true of cost. It might be a simple dollars 
> and cents calculation, it might be more complex.  Almost 
> certainly the calculation would ultimately involve relative 
> value - is the worth of this tool (however they choose to 
> calculate that) compared to the cost of this tool (however 
> they choose to calculate that) greater than any comparable 
> tool or set of tools. 
> That's a process I can understand.  I even understand when a 
> customer decides they can get more value with other tools - 
> even though I may not always agree with that decision. 
> 
> I'm not sure I understand the mentality that says because the 
> physical nature of this tool is nothing more that bits on a 
> disk it has no more value that the disk. To me that is like 
> saying a prescription medication should cost no more that the 
> total cost of the physical ingredients.
> 
> 
> > Currently the world is in a flux between boxed software 
> mentality, and SAAS.
> > No one likes change. Niche markets will be able to hold out longer, 
> > but eventually "the computer is the network" will win out.
> >   
> We're working toward a model that will more easily allow our 
> customers to be a provider of services. If our work creates 
> tools that bring value to our customers it does not seem 
> wrong to me to expect to be compensated for what goes into 
> creating and maintaining those tools. 
> Creating tools does not fit easily into the software as a 
> service model. 
> I suppose we could reinvent ourselves by using our software 
> to create services rather than selling it to others but in 
> the long run there would seem to me to be a lot less value created.
> 
> Ron
> 
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