Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

It has been a really busy couple of months but the Facebook announcement has created an incredible amount of interest. More about that later.

One of the topics that the Blue Ocean Strategy covers really well is “It’s about Value Innovation not Price Alone” and what is meant by this. Cheap alternatives have been around for years. Geoffrey Moore discussed them specifically in his model where there were Gorillas, Chimps and Monkeys. If cost was the only driver then monkeys would have been dominating the planet of software many years ago.

The additional critical factor is value innovation that is important and relevant to the customer. Value innovation is about reducing cost by eliminating factors the industry competes on that customers don’t value and innovating on elements the industry has not offered. A good historical example is Compaq vs. DEC, HP and Sequent. Customers predominantly wanted a machine for file sharing and shared printing. DEC, HP and Sequent had high-priced, machines that were too complex to administer for most departments. Compaq was not only a third of the cost, it was twice as powerful at file sharing and shared printing.

Alfresco is typically a tenth of the cost of traditional ECM vendors. However, the real reason ECM has not been rolled out is because it is too:

• Expensive

And too hard to:

• Install
• Use
• Rollout
• Scale-out to large numbers of users
• Develop Content Centric Applications
• Ties you in to a proprietary Architecture

What Alfresco has done is address the cost issue and innovate on each of the other issues. A core part of value innovation for open source is simplicity or ease-of-use. Alfresco, as well as being a tenth of the cost, is as simple as a shared drive with no client install. This innovation in ease-of-use has commoditized key parts of the traditional complex sales process and enterprise sales force.

What Alfresco is about is content enabling mass market, mass usage interfaces - shared drive, MS-Office, WordPress and now Facebook. More about Facebook in the next article

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 11:40 am and is filed under Alfresco User Group, Facebook, Open Source Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.