“You don’t get differential advantage from your products, it’s from the way you speak to and relate to your customers . All products are excellent these days.”
The quote above paraphrases Malcolm McDonald from a podcast about his book, “Malcolm McDonald on Value Propositions: How to Develop Them, How to Quantify Them.”
This quote had nothing to do with OSS specifically, but consider for a moment how it relates to OSS.
Consider also in relation to the diagram below.
Let’s say the x-axis on this graph shows a list of features within any given OSS product. And the y-axis shows a KPI that measures the importance of each feature (eg number of uses, value added by using that feature, etc).
As Professor McDonald indicates, all OSS products are excellent these days. And all product vendors know what the most important features are. As a result, they all know they must offer the features that appear on the left-side of the image. Since all vendors do the left-side, it seems logical to differentiate by adding features to the far-right of the image, right?
Well actually, there’s almost no differential advantage at the far-right of the image.
Now what if we consider the second part of Prof McDonald’s statement on differential advantage, “…it’s from the way you speak to and relate to your customers.”
To me it implies that the differential advantage in OSS is not in the products, but in the service wrapper that is placed around it. You might be saying, “but we’re an OSS product company. We don’t want to get into services.” As described in this earlier post, there are two layers of OSS services.
One of the layers mentioned is product-related services (eg product installation, product configuration, product release management, license management, product training, data migration, product efficiency / optimisation, etc). None of these items would appear as features on the long-tail diagram above. Perhaps as a result, it’s these items that are often less than excellent in vendor offerings. It’s often in these items where complexity, time, cost and risk are added to an OSS project, increasing stress for clients.
If Prof McDonald is correct and all OSS products are excellent, then perhaps it’s in the services wrapper where the true differential advantage is waiting to be unlocked. This will come from spending more time relating to customers than cutting more code.
What if we take it a step further? What if we seek to better understand our clients’ differential advantages in their markets? Perhaps this is where we will unlock an entirely different set of features that will introduce new bands on the left-side of the image. I still feel that amazing OSS/BSS can give carriers significant competitive advantage in their marketplace. And the converse can give significant competitive disadvantage!
Are you desperately seeking to increase your OSS’s differential advantage? Contact us at Passionate About OSS to help map out a way.
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