Everything is free on the Internet
Last week, an IT professional was complaining on a forum about competition from “free” on the Net. He was asking whether it was still possible to make a decent living from IT. Some quite rightly replied that obviously yes, and that the free economy was a cash machine. It is simply a different business model, aimed at luring customers with free “loss leaders,” which subtly allow the user to realize that they need additional features or services that are… paid.
Without going into the details of the free economy (others have done it much better than I have; see, for example, C. Anderson’s book “Free!”), for my part, I mainly note that ultimately, whether software or a service is free does not really matter to our SME clients.
What are customers, and SMEs in particular, looking for?
The only real question is: what do our clients want?
- Answer 1: good, inexpensive software
- Answer 2: a nice website with the trendy tool and 3D animations on every page?
- Answer 3: sell more and better online through a high-performance website and/or a CRM tool suited to their organization?
If the answers are 1 and 2, then yes, free is serious competition. Even today’s best IT professional will tomorrow find on their path a stronger pro somewhere in the world who will do better for less. The race for the “best software” is a never-ending race (a race that also sometimes drives the client into a wall, but that’s another story).
In the case of answer 3, free is more of an asset and a serious way of improving the cost/effectiveness ratio: as soon as one is focused on the final result, one can freely pick from the range of available tools, whether free or not. With experience, one knows how to find the combination of tools that fits a particular situation. This makes it possible to offer SMEs that do not have the resources of large corporations highly efficient, tailor-made and above all… effective solutions.
Free, paid, proprietary or Open Source software: a false debate?
Eureos’s added value is not in designing tools: it lies in setting up the winning chain that goes from a search engine query to placing an order. This requires, among other things, a CMS, countless scripts, statistical tools, survey tools, a CRM, graphic design tools, documentation editors, video streaming sites, RSS feed aggregators, blogging platforms, mapping modules, an email server, a server backup tool, etc. Each of the things I have mentioned exists in proprietary, open-source, free, paid, hosted or non-hosted form… Who cares about that? Certainly not the client, who already has more than enough to do with their own business (in a large organization, the IT director is at least somewhat aware of it, but I am focusing on SMEs / very small businesses). Of course, some unfortunate choices can ultimately have troublesome consequences, such as dependence on a vendor in the case of proprietary solutions. The solution? Working over the long term with your service provider, who will seek to develop sustainable solutions rather than deliver as quickly as possible a tool that is “just according to the specifications” without looking any further.
Thinking in terms of systems rather than tools: let us stand by our choices
Finally, to wrap up on the subject, I cannot resist the pleasure of telling you a revealing anecdote that took place when Eureos was presenting its collaborative platform solutions to a large business promotion organization.
We were then presenting the result of one year of operating Eureos.net. Our goal was to explain how, by organizing information properly and offering simple ways for users to contribute regularly, one could obtain astonishing results in terms of organic search ranking.
At the end of the presentation, everyone in the audience who was in contact with SMEs was enthusiastic. On the other hand, the communications manager was skeptical. She then said to me, “well, yes, actually, you’re using an ordinary CMS, that’s all…”.
That’s true. We use Plone, an ordinary (but formidable) CMS. So what? We could just as well use Drupal, WordPress or even Joomla, and it would not change a thing. The strength of what we are presenting is that it is a complete system, one that thinks first about meeting the needs of people and businesses before being a tool.
Old habits die hard…
