Laura's Box of Chocolates

An Ah-Ha moment...

Logged on this morning to share from the Joy Of Cooking...and was immediately distracted by my RSS feeds...and of course, Simon's was blinking at the top. (Oh, I really need to post this item about Lentils, because Patrick is coming for dinner and he's vegan, and I'm not...and thanks goodness for The Joy of Cooking)

But I can't.

Payment at the Point of Value.  There it is. Some folks might say they have value at the point of acquisition--like a theme for a blog template. It's a bit like try and buy, only without the bomb going off, or the gentle reminders to "click here to complete your purchase".

Is the Point of value when the revenue stream opens up, or when the developer innovation begins? I think it's probably different depending on the origin of the software. The blog template above, easy to see when the value comes in--as a user it's when you click "okay". As a developer, it's sometime before that. In more complex open source-based programs, say, MySQL, the user value comes after deployment--the developer value again, sometime before that. 

The Developer value could be characterized as customizations, data models, business intelligence, flows--and those come after deployment, when the "requirement to put back" would no longer apply. Because if companies thought they had to put back any data or business intelligence that would enhance the deployment of the open source-based product, that might be seen as an Uh-Oh moment.

And then there's the point where a company delivers services based on the open source foundation of technology. I'm not thinking about service contracts here, but ring tones being downloaded from apache servers, or searches being hosted on LAMP stacks. Is this where the point of value is? When the company begins to collect the .002 transaction fee from financial services firms coming through an open source based platform? If so, that's probably why so many venture capitalists are hanging out in Open Source bars these days.

The point of value--for developers--when they build the code and start to browse and ideas form...
The point of value--for users--when they click "okay" and it does something for them...
The point of value--for companies--when more users click "okay" and revenue volumes begin...

LKR


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