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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] Novell comments on the future of KDE in SuSE
From:       Charles de Miramon <cmiramon () kde-france ! org>
Date:       2003-11-07 13:57:01
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Le Vendredi 7 Novembre 2003 06:21, George Staikos a écrit :
> 
> It would really be nice to have such a company to feed off of though!
> > -) Seriously, how exactly would one go about setting up a company like
> that where there is no real market for it, no sustainable business model,
> and funding is hard to find?  Is this really realistic?  I'm sure there is
> a way to make a business model out of this, but I'm skeptical that now is
> the right time, or that "KDE" is even the right approach.

My idea of a business plan for KDE is a network of small companies specialized 
in vertical markets not selling KDE but KDE for German Dentists ; KDE for 
Canadian Lawyers, etc... A tailored KDE + home made and proprietary 
applications special for this line of business + installation, services, 
documentation, etc...

Before, vertical applications used to be programmed from scratch, were buggy 
and always lacking functionalities and UI nightmares. With KDE, you can add 
them on top of the regular KDE applications and leverage the power, stability 
of the KDE core. 

It would be a evolution like SAP for the Entreprise Application  Market. ERP 
gave a standard technological base with different modules that could be 
easily be plugged in. It was no more developpers struggling with Cobol and 
SQL but consultants at Accenture adapting business processes to the SAP way. 

There are already a lot of vertical applications (from Excel macros to Visual 
Basic / Access programs) but two evolutions mean that professionals wil have 
to make new investments :
- A lot of business processes need the Net for getting and sending 
informations. Old vertical applications were not capable of doing that.
- Upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP and then Longhorn will break a lot 
of applications.


It would be more a cottage industry with small teams of developpers and 
commercial people that would share an open-source core. Once you have 
cornered a specific market, I don't think you can be easily copied. You will 
never become the master of the desktop universe (as Ximian hoped) but you can 
make a decent living.

Cheers,
Charles
-- 
cmiramon@kde-france.org
http://www.kde-france.org

 
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