Does “Free” Belong In The Enterprise?
In case you’ve been marooned on a desert island, a certain four-letter word starting with the letter F has got everyone in a tizzy these days. I mean “free”, of course.
Recently, Chris “Long Tail” Anderson’s book about “Free” (read it for free here) was reviewed by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, in which he wondered why the idea of selling for free was “being elevated to a philosophical principle”. Good point. Maybe “free” is simply a pricing strategy.
My company plays in the SAP world and naturally, it’s hard to imagine anything being sold for free here.
Like any other business application, our solutions and services are are evaluated by individuals from business (Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain Management), IT (ERP, CRM, BI), Security, Governance and of course, Finance.
The reason for that is partly functional (”does it meet everyone’s needs?”) and partly for impact reasons (”does your solution introduce yet another layer of complexity for my database administrator?”).
So even if we gave some things away for free, the customer would still have to worry about details like interfaces and if those interfaces would break when SAP introduced the next enhancement pack and so on.
Just because they don’t have to pay for the software doesn’t mean it will run for free. What CIO would like to explain a possible CRM system crash to the Sales VP by saying “well, it all began when we downloaded this free software….”? Not in a million years.
The problem isn’t one of enterprise vendors not being creative enough to “sell” things for free. It’s that companies won’t buy free. A contract and a price tag are a promise of accountability. That’s the way it has been and that’s the way it will be.