121–130 of 172 posts
Actually, AWS Marketplace is trying to do exactly this.
I know. And given how hostile Amazon can be to sellers, I would love to see them fail to become the standard.
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As someone who works in the enterprise space, I fully agree with you. In every enterprise I've ever worked at, the purchasing process is a nightmare - it invariably takes months at best to purchase anything, and the bureaucracy, meetings and wasted time will cost you your soul. When you add up all the wasted man-hours it takes to purchase a $100 app, it will easily run to an order of magnitude more - at best . Once y…
Unfortunately legal concerns about data privacy are pushing enterprises towards MORE of this stuff, not less.
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I agree. Incredibly though, the same organisations will spend hundreds of man-hours quibbling over whether a dev team really needs a $20 app. Sometimes I really hate working for large companies!
Me: "John wants to use this $20 app" Manager: "Ok, schedule a meeting with the 3 of us and my boss to determine if it makes sense" Me: "The 4 of us talking about this for a half hour will cost the company $375." Manager: "..." [cut to inside the $375 meeting] Manager's Manager: "Things are tight, we just don't have the budget this year."
Then there is another piece of software that costs $200,000 but that's okay because someone more important than John decided they need it. Probably some website where you can upload PowerPoint presentations.
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Yeah, telling your customers that they should modernize is a great way to let someone else sell to them.
OTOH, telling an entire industry to reorganize to accommodate your internal processes is also a fools errand. Just imagine the dilemma this puts on the growth team: "Hmm, spend 1000x effort to land this one customer or fix an obscure bug in the signup page and get an extra 1000 self-serve customers this month. Golly, I don't know..."
This is a pretty established distribution model often called "bottom up" approach, and it's particularly relevant to enterprise sales where you allow the users to start using the software without friction [something that was proper to "consumer" applications] and then allow management to pay for that software, or users to pull their corporate credit card and buy what their budget allows. One turn-off for us for machi…
If it's an important service it's not a big deal at all to speak to someone, and frankly, even though they do this for price discrimination, the fact is they can incredibly helpful and save you a boat load of time and effort trying to understand the product in many cases. Yes, some things should 'just be self serve' but many things, not so much.
You can really only know a car by test driving it. But that doesn't meant that Toyota doesn't publish photos of its interiors and asks you to schedule a test drive before finding out the price. I can quickly find out what cars might be suitable for my needs given their properties and their pricing, and THEN commit my time to test driving the best candidates. If you just say "Believe me. This is the best car. People are saying what a great car this is. This is a car that you'll come in and you'll test drive, and you'll say that you've never even seen a car this good." Well I'm just going to ignore you.
Sounds more like certain purchasing departments need to modernize, not the other way around. IMHO. Not being able to use the right tools for the job, because some bean counters don't like complexity, is silly and shortsighted.