Fw: [Asterisk-biz] AsterBill

[Francisco A. Lozano]

Lists escribió:

>On Friday 05 August 2005 08:47, Francisco A. Lozano wrote:
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>>I don't think the problem is the $150. It's in fact very cheap $1800/year
>>for such kind of application (provided it is a complete, well-done,
>>dependable and stable system).
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>Yes, billing is often the archilles heel of many smaller carriers and $1800 
>per year is a good price.
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>>I think the problem is depending on any small company for your business.
>>You can depend on Oracle, on SAP, on Microsoft and on IBM. But you can't
>>depend on a small company, or at least I wouldn't do it; have had bad
>>experiences with that in the past.
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>(Interesting choice of words in the same sentence, depend & microsoft. : ) 
>Besides you are running a bit of A=A=A computation with small companies. A 
>better measurement would be the track history.
>
>Small companies ($1-50M) can often be more dependable to care for their 
>customers and try to do the right thing. Big companies like ms live for THEIR 
>pockets and could care less about you. So the opposit is also true.
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I agree, small companies are really GREAT, as you deal with persons and 
not with a brand. BUT  you have to be very careful about it. Depend on 
microsoft? yup, I know that Microsoft SQL Server will stay there in 
2010. But I don't know if a small database vendor will stay there in 
2010: If I had choosen some years ago Ovrimos SQL Server,  I'd be in 
trouble right now: go www.ovrimos.com and see. Another example: remember 
the bunch of dbase-style development environments that there were many 
years ago, from small and big companies? which ones last? MS-FoxPro and 
few more.

I agree that small --> bad and big --> good is a heavy simplification, 
but the size of a company is one of the decission-makers when choosing a 
software provider.

Anyway, I'd better stay with a small company which provides me source 
code than with a big company which hides their source code.

>Obviously the 'lemonade stand' type operation is not likely to be able to 
>handle sudden changes, and is more prone to go out of business due to simple 
>things like rain or health problems. Of course greedy/criminal management 
>like in SCO and ENRON have shown that the moral values is also a vital 
>statistic to evaluate against.
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>As they say, money is the lowest of motivators, while duty is the highest.
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