4 ms·

>too small I'm sorry to tell you, but I am one of those people who frequently argue against a small less established vendor, at least for anything really impor

>too small I'm sorry to tell you, but I am one of those people who frequently argue against a small less established vendor, at least for anything really important. Why? I've been burned a few times. New (< 5 years) small companies can disappear overnight. If they don't simply disappear and have a bit of revenue then they often get acquired by one of the big players. Those players either: 1) don't know how to properly manage this new product and it stagnates, the 75% of account managers are fired and support goes to shit. Or: 2) the company has no intention of keeping the product, and despite initial assurances to the contrary a year goes by and I get a notice that they're shifting all customers of the acquired product to their own competing version. Sometimes this comes with a very sneaky hard sell to re-up on a long term contract before the announce the product EOL.

CPLX 5y ago
3) You do in fact get to keep the product you wanted but now a sociopathic sales team tries to get you to pay 3x as much for a long term contract to lock you into it.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Ah, yes. I noped out of that once, though I had to stick it out for a year or so before I could call it quits.
- protomyth 5y ago
  Or they use a "licensing audit" as a negotiating tool for that long term contract.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Ah, the Oracle method. I'm betting a lot of PeopleSoft customers found themselves on the sharp end of that stick when Oracle bought them out.
syshum 5y ago
Ironically I have been burned often by big companies... ohh sure they do not go out of business, but they do other things like killing off products, versions, features, etc... that will burn you
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Oh, definitely. But once you've worked with them, you at least know what you're getting into: A metastable dysfunctional relationship that you'll at least both stick around in, for the good of the kids. (Money is the kids in this bad analogy)
cryptonector 5y ago
So the answer to buy vs. build is to build, then? No, the answer to buy vs. build is always to buy if you can -- building is a lot like buying from a startup, which one wouldn't do, only you own the startup and you won't be selling its products. You'll spend a few years looking for a product that exists, has a track record, and can be integrated into your environment with not that much effort. And buzzwords -- the product has to have those in its marketing, because you too have to sell it: internally. Oh, and it has to not be too expensive. I've seen godsends get adopted then dropped and replaced with a hodge-podge of in-house + cloud solutions just because the godsends turned out to cost way too much as deployed. Meanwhile the companies that would exist and have such products for you don't exist because no one wants to buy from startups (because probably fly-by-night), but also the bigger players won't build niche products either. Mostly you'll make do with whatever you have already in place, no matter the suckage. Then some day there will be an open source version of the product you wanted, and you'll still wait a year or three before you decide to use it, and you'll have to put a decent bit of effort into integration and maybe even participation in the upstream community. This stuff ain't easy. Anything that is infrastructure is just hard to monetize. There's a tragedy of the commons sort of thing going on. Capital-intensive infrastructure (i.e., tied to hardware) is easier: you up-charge on the HW. Think storage, where you can charge a pretty penny for chassis and drives (SSDs, whatever) and backup solutions, but the real hard and expensive part is in the software (it'd better not fail). It's like paying very little for a printer but being locked into unnaturally expensive ink, except backwards. Of course, some places do end up doing all the in-house building because they are too dynamic to do anything else and they can't afford to wait. We call these places FAANGs (or is it MAANAs?).
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Thank you - I was getting worried by all the "the real world is a tough place" comments - this brings it firmly back to the real world is populated by fools who don't understand it. good insights :-)
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    What happens is that when management gets burned by one of startups, big vendors, or internal dev teams, the response tends to be "ok, we're not doing that again!". It's like all the silly legal disclaimers you see on... docs, email footers, etc. -- these all represent ways in which some lawyer's customers got burned once. You can't win this game. There's no real reason to think that because you got burned by option A once you always will, especially when you can get burned with all options. But we humans don't work that way. Traumatic experiences tend produce lasting negative responses. There is just no substitute for understanding the technologies and the people involved. The problem with vendors is that they keep you from really knowing what's going on inside them. One problem with internal dev teams is that they can fall apart. It's all just hard, and management just has to be very good.
cryptonector 5y ago
One place I worked at did contract with a startup and whose product I was involved in integration, and that vendor later failed. We had a source code escrow clause in the contract. That's a lot like using an open source product whose upstream dies, but you're still using, and now you get to be the upstream if you really want to. Source code escrow is an option, at least for proprietary software products.
mcv 5y ago
Whether it's a big or small company, for anything vital, you will always need assurances for the continuity of the work. Large companies can also go bankrupt or decide this type of work isn't viable for them. What you need, in those cases, is access to everything: the source code, the deployment passwords, everything. Let them be kept in escrow until the vendor becomes unable or unwilling to fulfil their duties.
- hpcjoe 5y ago
  When faced with such discussions about small companies being higher risk, I'd trot out Sun Microsystems, GM, Chrysler, etc. There is risk. There is always risk. Risk has little to do with size. It has a great deal to do with management, capital, ability to acquire and keep customers, etc. As a "startup", we were in business for a decade with revenues of several million per year and growing around 30% YoY, successful/stable products proven in the field in which we were selling them. Dominating in most of the technical and support aspects compared to competitors. What I found was that the people claiming "too small" were simply conflating larger/well known brand name with reduction of risk. This bias exists throughout this industry, and has for a while. The old "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" is a historical example of this. Yet, when the market feces hit the fan, IBM was infamous for leaving the very markets that they had troubles in. Google is infamous for its killing off things, effectively at random. I could go on, but the point is that large well known brand is not synonymous with low risk. Rather the opposite. But, I'm out of that market and that chapter of my life has been completed. Now that I'm in a small but growing company, it helps that I can see things from this side, in that I still see reluctance to consider worthy technology. Risk aversion takes many forms, and often the decisions made do little to mitigate the risk. Rather, I've seen it concentrate/increase said risk.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    As a "startup", we were in business for a decade Then yours is not a company I would be concerned with. < 5 years and the leadership may still be looking for their lucrative exit. At 10 years I'm convinced that an easy exit isn't the short term goal and the business is somewhere near self-sustaining. I could be wrong, but there's always risk. Recently (well, 3 years ago) my workplace went best bread for a specific need and the vendor was about 6 years old. But in that time they'd grown so much by having an truly fantastic product that I was convinced that even if they were acquired, it would be for the acquiring company to adopt a truly superior product rather than convert customers to their own mediocre offering. Which turned out to be correct: they were acquired, but by a private capital group looking to pump $$$ into them to facilitate more growth & either flip/ipo them. Though to be fair, feature growth had slowed too, but it's also a mature product now so to much growth there would be bloat. Either way, it's an example of a relatively young & small vendor that had the characteristics needed to make me comfortable in their selection.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
It's so frustrating from the other side. I've lost business to bigger companies because of size. Twenty years later and I am still supporting that software whilst the bigger companies walked away years ago.
GabeIsko 5y ago
Most of the large contractors are turning around and subcontracting to these smaller companies. At least, that has been my experience in government contracts and bids. Probably better that way, since the contractor takes all the risks that are associated with smaller orgs. But, you would be surprised how many large contractors are bidding with absolutely no delivery capability. It's routine. Government software procurement is broken.
- aweiland 5y ago
  One of the contracts in a government group I used to work in was out for re-bid. No one expected anyone but the incumbent to win. When they didn't the new winner had no capability to actually put bodies in seats. They had to push the changeover date back 3 times while the new prime tried to convince all of the existing subs to come over. Their rate structure wasn't as good so they had lots of problems.
version_five 5y ago
100% agreed. The time to work with startups is to try something cool and new but not business critical. I've worked at startups and and big services companies. At startups, we've gone out of business in the middle of projects, or decided "we don't do that anymore" while we're doing it, and abandoned clients. As the lead of a small provider, I'm always a few screwups away from not being able to make payroll and losing all my staff, and if I'm hit by a bus or have a personal emergency, there is no backup. At a big company, we had actual continuity plans, a diverse business that was not going to unravel over some minor thing, and thousands of employees that would be able to fill in if needed. There are lots of exciting reasons to work with startups, or small providers, but there is a reason whi big companies exist and can charge a premium that covers their higher overhead
- dkersten 5y ago
  As a consumer, I also no longer use startup products if I can help it. There have been too many occasions where some product I loved got killed because either they went bust or because “we’re so excited to share the news that we got acquired by google (or whoever)! Wow! We promise nothing will change” a year later the product is killed. Sigh.

CPLX 5y ago

3) You do in fact get to keep the product you wanted but now a sociopathic sales team tries to get you to pay 3x as much for a long term contract to lock you into it.

ineedasername 5y ago
Ah, yes. I noped out of that once, though I had to stick it out for a year or so before I could call it quits.
protomyth 5y ago
Or they use a "licensing audit" as a negotiating tool for that long term contract.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Ah, the Oracle method. I'm betting a lot of PeopleSoft customers found themselves on the sharp end of that stick when Oracle bought them out.

syshum 5y ago

Ironically I have been burned often by big companies... ohh sure they do not go out of business, but they do other things like killing off products, versions, features, etc... that will burn you

ineedasername 5y ago
Oh, definitely. But once you've worked with them, you at least know what you're getting into: A metastable dysfunctional relationship that you'll at least both stick around in, for the good of the kids. (Money is the kids in this bad analogy)

cryptonector 5y ago

So the answer to buy vs. build is to build, then? No, the answer to buy vs. build is always to buy if you can -- building is a lot like buying from a startup, which one wouldn't do, only you own the startup and you won't be selling its products. You'll spend a few years looking for a product that exists, has a track record, and can be integrated into your environment with not that much effort. And buzzwords -- the product has to have those in its marketing, because you too have to sell it: internally. Oh, and it has to not be too expensive. I've seen godsends get adopted then dropped and replaced with a hodge-podge of in-house + cloud solutions just because the godsends turned out to cost way too much as deployed. Meanwhile the companies that would exist and have such products for you don't exist because no one wants to buy from startups (because probably fly-by-night), but also the bigger players won't build niche products either. Mostly you'll make do with whatever you have already in place, no matter the suckage. Then some day there will be an open source version of the product you wanted, and you'll still wait a year or three before you decide to use it, and you'll have to put a decent bit of effort into integration and maybe even participation in the upstream community. This stuff ain't easy. Anything that is infrastructure is just hard to monetize. There's a tragedy of the commons sort of thing going on. Capital-intensive infrastructure (i.e., tied to hardware) is easier: you up-charge on the HW. Think storage, where you can charge a pretty penny for chassis and drives (SSDs, whatever) and backup solutions, but the real hard and expensive part is in the software (it'd better not fail). It's like paying very little for a printer but being locked into unnaturally expensive ink, except backwards. Of course, some places do end up doing all the in-house building because they are too dynamic to do anything else and they can't afford to wait. We call these places FAANGs (or is it MAANAs?).

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Thank you - I was getting worried by all the "the real world is a tough place" comments - this brings it firmly back to the real world is populated by fools who don't understand it. good insights :-)
- cryptonector 5y ago
  What happens is that when management gets burned by one of startups, big vendors, or internal dev teams, the response tends to be "ok, we're not doing that again!". It's like all the silly legal disclaimers you see on... docs, email footers, etc. -- these all represent ways in which some lawyer's customers got burned once. You can't win this game. There's no real reason to think that because you got burned by option A once you always will, especially when you can get burned with all options. But we humans don't work that way. Traumatic experiences tend produce lasting negative responses. There is just no substitute for understanding the technologies and the people involved. The problem with vendors is that they keep you from really knowing what's going on inside them. One problem with internal dev teams is that they can fall apart. It's all just hard, and management just has to be very good.

cryptonector 5y ago

One place I worked at did contract with a startup and whose product I was involved in integration, and that vendor later failed. We had a source code escrow clause in the contract. That's a lot like using an open source product whose upstream dies, but you're still using, and now you get to be the upstream if you really want to. Source code escrow is an option, at least for proprietary software products.

mcv 5y ago

Whether it's a big or small company, for anything vital, you will always need assurances for the continuity of the work. Large companies can also go bankrupt or decide this type of work isn't viable for them. What you need, in those cases, is access to everything: the source code, the deployment passwords, everything. Let them be kept in escrow until the vendor becomes unable or unwilling to fulfil their duties.

hpcjoe 5y ago
When faced with such discussions about small companies being higher risk, I'd trot out Sun Microsystems, GM, Chrysler, etc. There is risk. There is always risk. Risk has little to do with size. It has a great deal to do with management, capital, ability to acquire and keep customers, etc. As a "startup", we were in business for a decade with revenues of several million per year and growing around 30% YoY, successful/stable products proven in the field in which we were selling them. Dominating in most of the technical and support aspects compared to competitors. What I found was that the people claiming "too small" were simply conflating larger/well known brand name with reduction of risk. This bias exists throughout this industry, and has for a while. The old "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" is a historical example of this. Yet, when the market feces hit the fan, IBM was infamous for leaving the very markets that they had troubles in. Google is infamous for its killing off things, effectively at random. I could go on, but the point is that large well known brand is not synonymous with low risk. Rather the opposite. But, I'm out of that market and that chapter of my life has been completed. Now that I'm in a small but growing company, it helps that I can see things from this side, in that I still see reluctance to consider worthy technology. Risk aversion takes many forms, and often the decisions made do little to mitigate the risk. Rather, I've seen it concentrate/increase said risk.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  As a "startup", we were in business for a decade Then yours is not a company I would be concerned with. < 5 years and the leadership may still be looking for their lucrative exit. At 10 years I'm convinced that an easy exit isn't the short term goal and the business is somewhere near self-sustaining. I could be wrong, but there's always risk. Recently (well, 3 years ago) my workplace went best bread for a specific need and the vendor was about 6 years old. But in that time they'd grown so much by having an truly fantastic product that I was convinced that even if they were acquired, it would be for the acquiring company to adopt a truly superior product rather than convert customers to their own mediocre offering. Which turned out to be correct: they were acquired, but by a private capital group looking to pump $$$ into them to facilitate more growth & either flip/ipo them. Though to be fair, feature growth had slowed too, but it's also a mature product now so to much growth there would be bloat. Either way, it's an example of a relatively young & small vendor that had the characteristics needed to make me comfortable in their selection.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

It's so frustrating from the other side. I've lost business to bigger companies because of size. Twenty years later and I am still supporting that software whilst the bigger companies walked away years ago.

GabeIsko 5y ago

Most of the large contractors are turning around and subcontracting to these smaller companies. At least, that has been my experience in government contracts and bids. Probably better that way, since the contractor takes all the risks that are associated with smaller orgs. But, you would be surprised how many large contractors are bidding with absolutely no delivery capability. It's routine. Government software procurement is broken.

aweiland 5y ago
One of the contracts in a government group I used to work in was out for re-bid. No one expected anyone but the incumbent to win. When they didn't the new winner had no capability to actually put bodies in seats. They had to push the changeover date back 3 times while the new prime tried to convince all of the existing subs to come over. Their rate structure wasn't as good so they had lots of problems.

version_five 5y ago

100% agreed. The time to work with startups is to try something cool and new but not business critical. I've worked at startups and and big services companies. At startups, we've gone out of business in the middle of projects, or decided "we don't do that anymore" while we're doing it, and abandoned clients. As the lead of a small provider, I'm always a few screwups away from not being able to make payroll and losing all my staff, and if I'm hit by a bus or have a personal emergency, there is no backup. At a big company, we had actual continuity plans, a diverse business that was not going to unravel over some minor thing, and thousands of employees that would be able to fill in if needed. There are lots of exciting reasons to work with startups, or small providers, but there is a reason whi big companies exist and can charge a premium that covers their higher overhead

dkersten 5y ago
As a consumer, I also no longer use startup products if I can help it. There have been too many occasions where some product I loved got killed because either they went bust or because “we’re so excited to share the news that we got acquired by google (or whoever)! Wow! We promise nothing will change” a year later the product is killed. Sigh.