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You might be surprised, but for many businesses that serve both enterprise and small customers, the smaller accounts often end up being a poor use of time. Whil

You might be surprised, but for many businesses that serve both enterprise and small customers, the smaller accounts often end up being a poor use of time. While it can vary, in many cases, small customers contribute only a small fraction of total revenue yet require a disproportionate amount of support and resources.

ocdtrekkie 2y ago
I'm not surprised, but I also don't think that's likely to be a thing for VMware: Most small customers have one to three servers running a basic vSphere install and nothing complicated to speak of. You can also delete most of the problem by limiting the support on given license tiers.
- infecto 2y ago
  We're speculating, but I think the key point is missed: SMBs likely contribute a negligible share of revenue, small enough that supporting them isn't worth it. Even if support seems minimal, billing issues and tickets inevitably arise, often handled by a different team, which cancels out any marginal gains.
TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
This is a bane of my business. We’re a small business, but we’re a technology business. When we use a product we tend to use advanced features. Things like auditing and log streaming to SIEM, enforced SAML SSO, stuff like that. We tend not to need support, and when we do it’s almost always because something is broken on the vendor end. In the past six months I’ve filed exactly one support ticket. With Microsoft, due to a persistent internal error when calling a specific Azure API, which only they could fix, and which they did after about a week and a half. There is virtually nothing we can’t handle internally except for the the issues any customer couldn’t handle. The irony is that not having an avenue for SMBs makes SMBs sometimes go elsewhere and either spend more money (sometimes with a competitor), or missing out on basically “free” revenue. I understand the logic but it drives me crazy at times.
- infecto 2y ago
  This is a classic long tail issue. That segment of technically advanced, low-touch SMBs like yours absolutely exists—but it’s small, and hard to identify upfront. The problem is that the long tail as a whole tends to generate minimal revenue while driving disproportionately high support and product complexity.

ocdtrekkie 2y ago

I'm not surprised, but I also don't think that's likely to be a thing for VMware: Most small customers have one to three servers running a basic vSphere install and nothing complicated to speak of. You can also delete most of the problem by limiting the support on given license tiers.

infecto 2y ago
We're speculating, but I think the key point is missed: SMBs likely contribute a negligible share of revenue, small enough that supporting them isn't worth it. Even if support seems minimal, billing issues and tickets inevitably arise, often handled by a different team, which cancels out any marginal gains.

TheNewsIsHere 2y ago

This is a bane of my business. We’re a small business, but we’re a technology business. When we use a product we tend to use advanced features. Things like auditing and log streaming to SIEM, enforced SAML SSO, stuff like that. We tend not to need support, and when we do it’s almost always because something is broken on the vendor end. In the past six months I’ve filed exactly one support ticket. With Microsoft, due to a persistent internal error when calling a specific Azure API, which only they could fix, and which they did after about a week and a half. There is virtually nothing we can’t handle internally except for the the issues any customer couldn’t handle. The irony is that not having an avenue for SMBs makes SMBs sometimes go elsewhere and either spend more money (sometimes with a competitor), or missing out on basically “free” revenue. I understand the logic but it drives me crazy at times.

infecto 2y ago
This is a classic long tail issue. That segment of technically advanced, low-touch SMBs like yours absolutely exists—but it’s small, and hard to identify upfront. The problem is that the long tail as a whole tends to generate minimal revenue while driving disproportionately high support and product complexity.