Monday, July 25, 2005

GE mentality

Joel Spolsky just wrote an article about how software companies make money. Basically, since there is no incremental cost to shipping more software, only the top supplier of a certain type of software can survive. If you aren't number one, you can't sell enough to make back the costs of hiring a bunch of developers to create your product.

That's why it's so encouraging to me that Oracle's Larry Ellison has embraced the GE mentality: "the belief that businesses must be, or become, number one or number two in their marketplaces." Oracle already has the number one possition in database, but they needed to buy PeopleSoft in order to remain or become number two in certain applications.

No comments: