On 2020/07/09 16:56, Simon Phipps wrote: > On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 5:47 PM Andreas Mantke <ma...@gmx.de> wrote: > >> >> please read through the whole discussion and you may get an impression >> that there are some intent to use TDF for such a promotion. >> > > However, those with that impression are entirely mistaken and it is wrong > to imply anyone is attempting the subversion you imply -- no-one has > proposed it. Those expressing the impression you describe have either > misunderstood or decided to misunderstand.
They might be mistaken, but in as much as Collabora has stated that they have had zero new customers since 2018, it looks a lot like Collabora, and the rest of the LibreOffice Ecosystem are looking at TDF/LibreOffice to also do their marketing for them. > because it is a mistake to imply that TDF offers support, or that TDF/LibreOffice offers Tier 0 support. As far as I can tell, that won't be changing. > as these leave corporate community members with more work to do explaining > their value, not less. TDF needs to leave room for the companies who inves in > the code to sustain themselves, There is absolutely nothing preventing the LibreOffice ecosystem vendors from marketing Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4 support. (FWIW, Collabora currently does market Tier 3 support.) However, as Collabora also pointed out in that email, there is no profit in SOHO support (^1). Unfortunately for the LibreOffice Ecosystem, the majority of organisations in the world are SOHO --- between 1 and 20 people work in them. My rough estimate is that 90% of the organisations, globally, have under 20 employees. (There are 250 countries on the planet. It takes roughly an hour per country, to get the appropriate data. So if somebody else wants to get that data for each country, and sort it out, for revenue, number of employees, and type of organisation, go for it. If TDF/LibreOffice is expected to do the marketing for and on behalf of the LibreOffice Ecosystem, then LibO Marketing absolutely has to have that data, to construct country specific/industry specific marketing plans. ) The issue that everybody is dancing around, is that the LibreOffice Ecosystem support vendors focus on large (More than 250 employees) organisations (^2), but the majority of LibO users are either individuals, or SOHO users. Going back to Italo's presentation, _Work From Home_ is going to be far more common, than it was prior to January 2020. Between businesses filing bankruptcy, and organisations deciding that it makes better financial sense to give every employee US$10,000 to set up their own home office, and eliminate leased office space, the commercial real estate market in the United States is looking at a tough future. (Of the businesses in the United States on 1 January 2020, projections are that roughly 25% of them will have filed bankruptcy by 1 January 2021, and almost as many will have permanently closed their doors by that date.) Your current large business might be willing and able to sign a support contract for Tier 1 or Tier 2. However, how much profit will the support vendor have, if, instead of one site per organisation, there are 500 sites per organisation? With WFH, can support vendors even offer on-site support? Those are issues that the support vendors need to address. ##### 1) The profit in SOHO support comes from systems integration --- both hardware and software. Back when white box makers were a dime a dozen, such contracts were readily available, albeit not advertised. 2) https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76842 exemplifies the potential client that the support vendor was unable to convert. 8,500 seats would be either £51,000 per month, or per year, assuming the publicly stated seat prices are accurate. (One place gave the base price as being per year. A different place gave the base price as being per month.) Without having the facts on hand, I'd guess that the issue was money --- specifically, that the bug-reporter was blind-sided by both the amounts involved, and was provided with none of the virtues of how & why paying for support would enable his organisation to be more effective. (Did the vendor rep point out that their support included software that enables rolling out new releases on a more timely basis, including extensions, templates, corporate palettes, and the like?) jonathon -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
