Hi Lionel,
First - thanks for your thoughtful feedback. I essentially agree =)
On 10/07/2020 02:40, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote:
> Redhat will sell you a yearly subscription for a single workstation,
> as low as 180 USD. So will SuSE for 32 GBP. Will any ecosystem company
> scale down ? That takes a fully automated setup, where people
> self-register and pay on your website.
Right - and such infrastructure requires significant investment to
setup; absent any need for that - no-one will do make that investment I
guess (outside of app-stores). Currently interest is negligible, so that
investment looks premature.
> Closer to home, Microsoft will sell you a single licence for their
> office suite, either as "perpetual" or "subscription" starting at 5
> USD/month or 8.25 USD/month, no upfront payment, pay each month. I
> wouldn't call the process entirely pain-free, but from their point of
> view, it doesn't require human intervention for every sale, for every
> invoice, for every payment.
Right.
> So, if ecosystem companies want to attract the same "every business
> user pays" model, they need to make that actually workable, easy and
> as painless as possible. Currently, my feeling is that it is
> deadlocked into a chicken and egg type problem; the ecosystem
> companies are the chicken, and they need to invest effort (and
> capital) lay the first eggs. They cannot wait for the economies of
> scale to drop into their lap and make it worthwhile to setup the
> human-free "pay us" system. They need to put the system in place, and
> only then can the number of small scale paying users actually grow.
Sure. Then again - if there is an explosion of interest that proves
demand (this would be a good problem to have) - I'm confident that the
ecosystem can respond in a matter of days to weeks to plug that gap =)
> If the developer ecosystem companies are not willing to put their
> money where their mouth is (and "lay the first eggs" for the SME
> market), the whole presentation needs to be refocused so that it is
> clear that only "enterprise" deployments of "many" (for some value of
> "many") users are invited/encouraged/under moral obligation to pay.
Which is a completely fair comment too. It's unclear of course if eg. a
Community Edition will yield any significant traction, and certainly
encouraging enterprises of a certain size to contribute (because others
might swamp the ecosystem with transaction & setup costs) is hard to do
in a single word =)
I imagine this can be finessed initially by careful marketing on the
LibreOffice Enterprise portal to steer the right people to use
LibreOffice Community vs. an Enterprise version.
Thanks,
Michael.
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