The World Is Flat Breakfast
I had a good time at Ismael Ghalimi‘s World Is Flat Breakfast the other day. Other folks have done a better job of blogging the whole event than I can. However, I did get a couple tidbits worth repeating.
One was an explanation of why Open Source will take over the world. It seems that large public software companies average $0.78 of sales and marketing cost for every dollar of license revenue. That makes it a pretty low margin business, even when compared to a service business like training and support. Open source has no license revenue, but also has no sales and marketing cost – so their overall margins can actually be higher!
The other tidbit was the names of a couple of companies that specialize in helping software development for software product companies. This is pretty different from custom development for enterprises, so it’s nice to see some folks with expertise in this area. The sponsor, Lohika, has been great partner to Intalio and at least one other company I know well. A couple others I have had good interactions with are Symphony and Persistent Systems.