As you can tell I’ve been reading a lot from the 37signals blog this week.
The title of this post comes from their post about Why Enterprise Software Sucks.
A few years ago everything was about the Fortune 500. Even I, as a lowly network engineer, had some familiarity with it. We’d all heard most of the names for sure. The 2007 list, for example, looks like this.
- Wal-Mart Stores
- Exxon Mobil
- General Motors
- Chevron
- ConocoPhillips
- General Electric
- Ford Motor
- Citigroup
- Bank of America
- American International Group
As a small Mac-focused company, there’s very little that we can target at these immense corporations. For one thing, they are pretty much standardised on Windows. That kinda kills any development stone dead. There’s some work we can do in the enterprise space which is platform-agnostic and we probably have a leg up on many in our position.
But is this where the money is?
I don’t think so.
Landing those big deals with the big companies out there lands you in a world of competition – where you’re often competing with the staff inside the company for work (which can make co-operation very difficult).
There are literally millions of companies out there and everyone, especially small businesses aiming to start to make it big, should be aiming at the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) sector. These companies have more limited budgets it’s true, but they are also much more in need of external expertise.
I said on a forum I run recently:
90% of small businesses don’t need to run a mail server on site. That sort of thing should be outsourced.
The other 10% are, of course, Microsoft Certified Partners….who insist on installing Exchange on a DSL line…
Outsourcing is a dirty word in many areas. It reminds me of my experiences with Compass, Nortel, CSC, IBM, Flextronics and other companies who I had dealings with. I’ve been outsourced and I’ve witnessed outsourcing and I have never found the process to be fulfilling or enjoyable. Quite the opposite. It ruined working relationships, built up hostility within teams and fostered a Can’t Do attitude in almost every case.
In these examples, it was the outsourcing of people which caused the problem. People are crazy, emotional, irrational. Of course it’s not going to be simple.
But should a mortgage advice/brokerage company run a mail server onsite? Should a design firm have any more technology onsite than the need to store their image libraries for swift access? Why does a company where everyone has a laptop feel the need to run essential services on their business broadband lines which, by the way, have ZERO assurance on uptime or bandwidth. (Yes, we’re getting dangerously into Bedouin territory here).
Outsourcing these functions in a small business where it’s not someone’s entire job makes a lot of sense. This is why, despite being a “technology” company, Infurious does not have their own dedicated mail server (sitting on a fluffy carpet in a warm dusty office). It’s why Mac-Sys, despite being a technology company, advises their customers to using hosting plans for their mail and web servers. Email is so important that you want it to be on 24×7, sitting in a cooled rack of other servers with multiply-redundant network pipes and avoid outages caused by someone kicking the cable while slouching in their chair.
There’s a lot of work involved in freeing the Fortune 5 000 000, the hosts of small businesses out there, from the legacy of blunders caused by centralising their infrastructure around legacy Exchange installations. Just my £0.02