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March 22, 2005
Open Source more customer focused?
Following on from what Matt Asay writes here (so read that first):
Instead of sitting in a tranquil DMZ, shielded (and informed) by product marketing, his developers actually hear real-world customer feedback all day long....
This process starts when those developers "meet" the customers inside the Open Source projects. As a project becomes more popular it attracts more and more "customers", i.e. those people actually using the application or framework. The customer feedback starts to flow through the mailing-lists and is important input for the development team.
The interesting thing happens when customers need more than just the occasional answer on the mailing list. If they require more than that, then the first obvious place for them to start looking for support is the project itself. And again the developers are visible there and not shielded behind some corporate firewall. So, the customers will approach those developers they think can help them - regardless of the company they work for. That doesn't matter any more.
Posted by Matthew at March 22, 2005 12:44 PM