Free is never free
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@jmoore said in Free is never free:
First, I know it would be less money over a period of time. I'm ok with that. I guess I 'Want" to believe that it would pay off in the end over the long term by making good relationships with clients and doing a good job by recommending exactly what they need for their business.
So this is where things break down. Saving customers money doesn't actually make for good relationships, primarily because it's very, very hard to explain to them how you saved them money. There is a reason that successful MSPs almost never work based off of customer needs but of their own needs. See other threads where people discuss the value of being local and showing up, at great cost, to the customer site just so that the customer can see them working. If systems never break, license renewals are never needed, and no one is ever there saving the day you tend to lose customers because you did a good job.
This is the sad truth of IT. This doesn't happen in the enterprise where people work from financial numbers. But in the SMB where people work from emotion, doing a good job and caring too much are great ways to have some sales guy pushing expensive, risky solutions meet the owner at the club and take your customers because they were willing to be self serving instead of helping the customer.
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@jmoore said in Free is never free:
i don't know what to say to this but I know your right, I've already experienced it. It is just sad though. Well i will keep working on my career I guess.
If it makes you feel better, remember that there is no one to blame for this except for the customers that make it happen. There are loads of ethical IT people out there ready and willing to do an awesome job. But most SMB owners and managers have no interest in that. They don't use "business value" or "profits" as their reason for selecting their business partners.
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@scottalanmiller said in Free is never free:
They don't use "business value" or "profits" as their reason for selecting their business partners.
Yeah and that is weird because you would think that would be what they care about most for their businesses. If I was a business owner it would be those exact things 95% of the time and possibly more that dictated what decisions I made. I did computer science and physics in college so the "math" means a lot to me!
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@jmoore said in Free is never free:
Yeah and that is weird because you would think that would be what they care about most for their businesses.
Those that do tend not to stay an SMB for very long.
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@scottalanmiller said in Free is never free:
Those that do tend not to stay an SMB for very long.
Yeah that makes sense. If you make the right decisions over a long period of time then you should be growing steadily. Fascinating subject.
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Something to understand about SMB owners is that some are great and on their way with their SMB from little to big, leaving the SMB behind. If you are a good manager and know how to run a company smartly, you will likely only run an SMB if you are confident that you can do the small to large move. If not, you'll likely take a job with a big business that will pay you better than your SMB could. The financial incentive to be good and run a non-growing SMB is small, so the people good at that basically will never do that.
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Interesting perspective. It does make a lot of sense too. I can definitely see how that would be the case. I guess as an IT person, it would make sense to apply some of the same ideas to ones career?
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@jmoore said in Free is never free:
@scottalanmiller said in Free is never free:
Those that do tend not to stay an SMB for very long.
Yeah that makes sense. If you make the right decisions over a long period of time then you should be growing steadily. Fascinating subject.
Yeah, statistically it's interesting because while the market is primarily SMBs, it's one of those things that changes over time.
It's like the stat about marriage. "50% of all marriages end in divorce." This makes it sounds like if you get married that you will have a 50/50 chance of divorce. But it leaves out that people who have gotten divorced before have a really high chance of getting divorced more than once. So while 50% of MARRIAGES end in divorce, only 25% of MARRIED PEOPLE get divorced!
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Oh for heavens sake guys.
This has nothing to do with whether open source is a bad thing. Re-read the article before you lampoon it.
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
Oh for heavens sake guys.
This has nothing to do with whether open source is a bad thing. Re-read the article before you lampoon it.
Please, what did we miss?
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
Oh for heavens sake guys.
This has nothing to do with whether open source is a bad thing. Re-read the article before you lampoon it.
They did and brought up valid critique... not sure why you think they are "lampoon"-ing it.
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"Paid software is awful because reasons"
Really tired of the herd like mentality.
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
Oh for heavens sake guys.
This has nothing to do with whether open source is a bad thing. Re-read the article before you lampoon it.
What was the point? It was presented that free was not free, but was likely costly and carried risks. But only risks that also applied to closed source or non-free software was presented. What did we miss?
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
"Paid software is awful because reasons"
Really tired of the herd like mentality.
But the herd mentality is what we were fighting. We provided logic and proof to an article that was misleading and clearly trying to herd people into fearing low cost simply because "free is never free" which is clearly false. It's too late to complain about people thinking for themselves, you attempted to herd, it didn't work. You think YOU are tired of this, we are tired of unfounded FUD being spread trying to push an agenda. We all felt it, hence the reaction. You didn't provide valid points, your post was misleading and incorrect.
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
"Paid software is awful because reasons"
Really tired of the herd like mentality.
They brought up valid critique to an article you wrote based on knowledge and information from the industry... and they are following the herd mentality?
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
Sometimes you do get a generous gift, sometimes you really do get a good deal but most of the time, its a trap for later down the line.
So, how are we to have taken this line, for example? I specifically asked you to provide examples of your post being true.
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@coliver said in Free is never free:
@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
"Paid software is awful because reasons"
Really tired of the herd like mentality.
They brought up valid critique to an article you wrote based on knowledge and information from the industry... and they are following the herd mentality?
And when they specifically question the industry standard herd mentality?
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
"Paid software is awful because reasons"
Really tired of the herd like mentality.
I definitely never said that, pretty sure Scott didn't either. My postings were specifically targeting the fact that paid software has every pitfall you mentioned, Plus all of the other problems paid software has.
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
"Paid software is awful because reasons"
No one said it was awful. There are many cases where paid software makes sense. But the fact that you paid for it often isn't a factor in if it makes sense or not, which is what you're arguing. "Because I paid for this piece of software it was the correct software for my company." Which is the wrong way to think about it.
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@breffni-potter said in Free is never free:
"Paid software is awful because reasons"
I think you only sense that this was said because you were trying to promote that "unpaid software is awful because reasons" and so you feel that pointing out the flaws in that statement led to the opposite statement. But that's not what happened. No one said paid software was bad, only that it carried all of the risks that you listed and a few more. It seems unlikely that you got the impression that anyone was saying that unless you were saying the opposite - had you only been trying to point out that open source still carries some risks then I think you would have seen the truth in the reactions that yes, it does, but closed source non-free software carries the same risks and more.
