“If you are a product company and you only have one customer, then you effectively have a boss.”
Given that even the biggest OSS product companies only have a few customers, there is a tendency for the customers to be matrix bosses.
To be in more control of your own destiny, you need to have a large number of customers, with no reliance on any one customer.
But you may ask how to achieve that since there are relatively few CSPs available to be your customers.
It needs a whole new paradigm – one that involves increasing the customer pool. The new paradigm is to look beyond CSPs, to their customers, to big organisations that consume a lot of communications services and have their own large, mission-critical networks.