I've worked for successful software start ups, and I've worked for Hewlett Packard.
Here's what I noticed:
In the startup that I worked for (BladeLogic), we started small and we grew organically. Many of our early customers were very small, but eventually we grew big enough to sell thousands of licenses to companies like Target and Bank of America.
By growing organically, it gave us an opportunity to improve the software without 'sinking the ship.'
IE, if you sell fifty thousand licenses to a company like Target, you better have your software sorted out before they sign the contract.
At Hewlett Packard, we didn't start small at all. From day one, we were doing huge deals, and selling software that was just months old. If I had it my way, I would've started off slowly, worked out the bugs, and then followed with a wide release to the big customers.
Everybody at [Big Software Co] knows the software is buggy and bad, but the client doesn't, [Big Software Co] just hopes it works well enough that the client doesn't reject it outright or refuse to pay.
While [Big Software Co] works out the kinks in it's software at the clients expense it blames the failures on implementation problems user error or whatever it can to keep money coming in while it fixes the software. [Big Software Co] hopes that the client eventually sinks so much money into the software that they can't leave and also X months into the deployment it works just well enough to keep them on the hook.
This pattern repeats over and over and over again in almost every industry. You see this same type of thing in construction too, where [Big Construction Co] deliberately underbids to get the contract, then runs up the cost WAY beyond what anybody expected over time, the municipality, or whomever contracted with them can't leave as they've already sunk so much money into [Big construction project] that they can't cancel and have nothing to show for it.
This is almost SOP for every giant company in every industry anywhere, often times these companies are so big that the left hand doesn't even know what the right hand is doing so to speak, as the two are separated by so many internal layers / business units or whatever.
The only reason people get into bed with these giant companies is that whoever is signing the cheques on the buy side irrationally feels that [Big Software Co] can actually deliver because they are so big.
Here's what I noticed:
In the startup that I worked for (BladeLogic), we started small and we grew organically. Many of our early customers were very small, but eventually we grew big enough to sell thousands of licenses to companies like Target and Bank of America.
By growing organically, it gave us an opportunity to improve the software without 'sinking the ship.'
IE, if you sell fifty thousand licenses to a company like Target, you better have your software sorted out before they sign the contract.
At Hewlett Packard, we didn't start small at all. From day one, we were doing huge deals, and selling software that was just months old. If I had it my way, I would've started off slowly, worked out the bugs, and then followed with a wide release to the big customers.