A micro bubble bursting in the productivity arena?

Posted by zoe
Aug 19, 2015 at 08:59 PM

It must be very tough out there for smaller companies to market their products/systems to the diverse landscape of large & small companies, individual freelancers, and academic/nonprofit users.

I’ve repeatedly read that the ultimate cost-benefit analysis is revenue vs. support for each class of user. Users who pay less (or nothing) tend to become money LOSERS for a company, even if they are evangelical. An article I read about the death of free-tier software said that free users do recruit more users; the only problem is that they recruit more FREE users. And they all need lots of hand-holding, which costs the company lots of time, money and manpower.

Conversely, larger enterprise customers are more likely to stay on the conservative side and stick to Outlook, Sharepoint, and other tested enterprise-level software, for all its faults. Even Evernote can’t really sell itself as a secure or reliable enough platform to be dependable for a sizeable corporation to depend on.

And as for us users, I find myself routinely circling back around to open-source software, plaintext files, and highly-portable non-database systems. I’m tired of fleeing sinking ship after sinking ship…