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0 pointssph1y ago0 comments

Weird question. There is no 100% effective software, there is no way to measure effectiveness (what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness") and it all depends on the budget.

If it fits your budget, and a commercial product has a good sales team (vs a cheaper opensource one with zero marketing), the commercial product is gonna get chosen even if it costs infinitely more. That's basically IBM and Oracle's play book.

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DeathArrow1y ago

I haven't make any claim about 100% effective software. However, one software can be less effective than another. Saying that one is 90% as effective than the other is just to help visualise things.

> what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness"

I work for a SaaS company. Our marketing and product teams work hard to convince potential customers that our software fulfills their needs at a reasonable cost.

When we buy services and software we don't look at any of the marketing materials, there are very trough analysis of costs/benefits being made, dollars and even cents are counted. Every cost that can be cut while we can still deliver something to our customers will be cut.

sphOP1y ago

I run a SaaS company as well. We are outliers, especially if you are selling to other tech people, who are technically proficient and don't value their time very much—they'd rather spend hours writing their own half-arsed solution than paying someone else $5/month. I know how hard it is to sell to someone that believe your product is nothing more than "a shell script written over a weekend" (paraphrased comment from my Show HN)

Outside of tech, that's not how it works. They don't have in-house developers. They don't read HN. When they need a database, they ring up a large vendor and spend hundred of thousands a year for Oracle, when a PostgreSQL container would do just fine. They often don't even care they could pay zero, simply because PostgreSQL doesn't come with a phone number to call when the DB crashes.

otabdeveloper41y ago

> they'd rather spend hours writing their own half-arsed solution than paying someone else $5/month

Paying someone else to solve your problems can also carry huge risks of all sorts. Sometimes investing 1000 dollars into a risk-free solution is better than 5 dollars a month with gigantic strings attached.

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