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Open Source — Selling Software That Sells Itself
mrcgran writes to mention that LinuxWorld is running an interview with Alfresco's Matt Asay. "Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals. [...] 'But you know what? We have worked with Microsoft on interop without doing any sort of a patent deal; as has Sugar and MySQL and Zend and these other companies. We work directly with Microsoft for a customer of ours to insure SQL Server integration with Alfresco. Didn't have to sign any patent deal with them to get that done. We both had a mutual customer. It was in our mutual interest. We both wanted to make money, therefore we did it. But the patent thing is a complete smoke and mirrors, I don't want to say trick, but it has nothing to do with interoperability. No matter how much Microsoft may repeat that, it has nothing to do with interoperability.'"
That article is worth its weight in raw platinum. The guy from Alfresco sound like one of the most open, decent and honest management types I've ever heard give an interview. The interview raised so many points that get discussed over and over and over here on slashdot, such as the need for sales people to be mediated by engineers so as not to give false expectations, such as the feeling that the propietry software models are not working very well because they are simply too expensive and place too much risk on the customer. He also notes how SuSE went south after the Microsoft-Novell deal, this directly from data on his own product.
The guy sounds like he would be a real pleasure to work for.