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few bigs target small business because, let's be honest, they're a pain to work with at scale It's not that difficult, it's just incentivized in our not-so-fre

by omouse 10y ago

few bigs target small business because, let's be honest, they're a pain to work with at scale It's not that difficult, it's just incentivized in our not-so-free market. Big companies can afford lawyers and lobbyists and they get all the best tax breaks and subsidies. Small companies, not so much. each one of them brings variations to the base product flavor but no budget to implement them Yep, because the base product is designed for the large clients. It's all incentives to target big companies. Why do you need permissions and user account management in your software? Because you're dealing with 20+ people and you may not know everyone in your company and if they can be trusted. Why do you have a base product that requires at least 10,000 database items in it to be useful? Because the big companies have that many items and they've got a monopoly or oligopoly on the market. I once proposed to have a sort of web excel with security controls and a way to let authenticated guests to work on a subset of cells as a way to move small businness online leaving control to them of their process implementation but couldn't find a sponsor. This is actually what should and would happen in a free market. The majority of companies are not very large; most of them have a bit of extra cash to invest in a tool like that. There is a definite market for it. But why isn't that market pursued? All of the above incentives mentioned above.

quanticle 10y ago
Big companies can afford lawyers and lobbyists and they get all the best tax breaks and subsidies. Small companies, not so much. What does that have to do with business-to-business transactions? Microsoft doesn't care about your subsidies. Oracle doesn't care about your tax breaks. All they care about is how many users you can bring or how many zeroes you can put on the contract. This is actually what should and would happen in a free market. This sort of coordination problem is actually a classic failure of free markets (it was even covered in my Economics 101 course). Coase's Theorem only applies when transaction and negotiation costs are zero. In any real world scenario where transaction costs are nonzero, you'll see failures like this.
- lkrubner 10y ago
  "All they care about is how many users you can bring or how many zeroes you can put on the contract." Which is influenced by the subsidies you get. Some industries more than others. The extreme case is the agricultural industry in the USA. Many of the big wheat firms would not exist without the vast subsidies offered by the government. For those firms, Oracle or Microsoft are only talking to you because you've gotten money from the government.
  - lkrubner 10y ago
    Why was this downvoted? It's a straightforward statement of the facts.
- omouse 10y ago
  They not only get subsidies, Microsoft and Oracle get to rely on patents and intellectual "property". They absolutely do care about tax breaks.
icebraining 10y ago
I work for a company which does pursue that market (we have everything from the sole freelancer to companies with thousands of workers), and I disagree. Regarding your example, most of our clients with 2-5 users do ask us to set up different permissions. In fact, I'd say that worrying about that is much more common in small companies, where the manager is often the owner and therefore often hates losing control of the processes. In terms of database items, the correlation does tend to hold, but the one thing about SMBs is that they vary a lot. If you ignore all those edge cases, you end up targeting just a small subset of the whole market. And the last point is crucial. You write about the "needs of big companies" and "needs of small companies", but in general there's no such thing. Each company, large or small, has its own needs, and a cookie-cutter solution - even if generally targeted to "small companies" - is simply insufficient for many. But while a large company can pay well to accommodate its idiosyncrasies, a small company can't, because those needs don't shrink proportionally to the budget. But I wouldn't say the market isn't being served, and the current bet on SaaS is a clear bet on SMBs, which often can't afford to pay for the purchase and maintenance of servers and the sysadmins to manage them.

by omouse 10y ago

quanticle 10y ago

Big companies can afford lawyers and lobbyists and they get all the best tax breaks and subsidies. Small companies, not so much. What does that have to do with business-to-business transactions? Microsoft doesn't care about your subsidies. Oracle doesn't care about your tax breaks. All they care about is how many users you can bring or how many zeroes you can put on the contract. This is actually what should and would happen in a free market. This sort of coordination problem is actually a classic failure of free markets (it was even covered in my Economics 101 course). Coase's Theorem only applies when transaction and negotiation costs are zero. In any real world scenario where transaction costs are nonzero, you'll see failures like this.

lkrubner 10y ago
"All they care about is how many users you can bring or how many zeroes you can put on the contract." Which is influenced by the subsidies you get. Some industries more than others. The extreme case is the agricultural industry in the USA. Many of the big wheat firms would not exist without the vast subsidies offered by the government. For those firms, Oracle or Microsoft are only talking to you because you've gotten money from the government.
- lkrubner 10y ago
  Why was this downvoted? It's a straightforward statement of the facts.
omouse 10y ago
They not only get subsidies, Microsoft and Oracle get to rely on patents and intellectual "property". They absolutely do care about tax breaks.

icebraining 10y ago

I work for a company which does pursue that market (we have everything from the sole freelancer to companies with thousands of workers), and I disagree. Regarding your example, most of our clients with 2-5 users do ask us to set up different permissions. In fact, I'd say that worrying about that is much more common in small companies, where the manager is often the owner and therefore often hates losing control of the processes. In terms of database items, the correlation does tend to hold, but the one thing about SMBs is that they vary a lot. If you ignore all those edge cases, you end up targeting just a small subset of the whole market. And the last point is crucial. You write about the "needs of big companies" and "needs of small companies", but in general there's no such thing. Each company, large or small, has its own needs, and a cookie-cutter solution - even if generally targeted to "small companies" - is simply insufficient for many. But while a large company can pay well to accommodate its idiosyncrasies, a small company can't, because those needs don't shrink proportionally to the budget. But I wouldn't say the market isn't being served, and the current bet on SaaS is a clear bet on SMBs, which often can't afford to pay for the purchase and maintenance of servers and the sysadmins to manage them.