Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Open source and competition

December 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Open source and competition

TAGS: Open Source

When you work for a startup you spend a decent amount of time doing competitive research (or at least you should) primarily so you can assuage fears that your company can effectively compete.

Typically in the open source world we try to know what our competition is doing, and have rebuttals about their products and market positioning-and typically the proprietary guys simply negate the the OSS challenger or spread a bit of FUD but usually don't have real heavy details or analysis.

Recently, one of our sales guys sent us over a shockingly long and extremely focused set of reasons "why not to buy Mule, but to buy us instead" drafted by one of our competitors for an account we are both pursuing. The big shock was not that the company had done this work, but the level of detail (including out-of-context quotes from Ross, the Muleman), and a list of FUD ala Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign. I suppose the other big surprise is that this all came from a company who is supposedly open source friendly.

So what did we learn?
First: all is fair in business. We go out of our way to not talk smack about competitors or spread misinformation, but when asked we have all sorts of responses as to why we (and the OSS approach) are better.

Second: large vendors, even those that embrace OSS are running scared about the open source impact on various markets. I was truly shocked at the research they had done to compete with our company.

Third: having a great product still matters. Regardless of what the competition says, if you have a great product that people want to use (and especially if you have production users) you are going to have some level of success. If your product remains innovative and you do some decent marketing your probability for success goes way up.

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on December 7, 2006 06:13 AM

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