> Except that it incentivises a company to build a product that requires continuing support.
People say this a lot, but in our case we really haven't seen this incentive for a couple of reasons.
Large organizations are more than happy to pay for training and development support to accelerate their time to market. It doesn't matter how polished your product is -- databases are complex enough that people are willing to pay for best practices, training, and support.
Similarly, databases are pretty critical pieces of the infrastructure. If anything goes wrong, it can significantly impact the business, so people always want operational/production support.
There are many enterprise services that can be built on top of the product that can be very valuable. You don't have to build a crappy product -- there are plenty of ways to monetize with a great product.
Finally, a bad product will significantly limit growth of the company in the long term. There are lots of options now -- you can't get away with building a crappy product and an artificial monopoly.
If you see a crappy product from a company that offers subscription support, it's probably not because of misaligned incentives. Building databases is really hard, I don't think the business model has much to do with it.
People say this a lot, but in our case we really haven't seen this incentive for a couple of reasons.
Large organizations are more than happy to pay for training and development support to accelerate their time to market. It doesn't matter how polished your product is -- databases are complex enough that people are willing to pay for best practices, training, and support.
Similarly, databases are pretty critical pieces of the infrastructure. If anything goes wrong, it can significantly impact the business, so people always want operational/production support.
There are many enterprise services that can be built on top of the product that can be very valuable. You don't have to build a crappy product -- there are plenty of ways to monetize with a great product.
Finally, a bad product will significantly limit growth of the company in the long term. There are lots of options now -- you can't get away with building a crappy product and an artificial monopoly.
If you see a crappy product from a company that offers subscription support, it's probably not because of misaligned incentives. Building databases is really hard, I don't think the business model has much to do with it.