No I did not know that they were part of that index.
Seriously - I and others here know that what we have nobody else can touch. Not even close. No other development tool is in the same ballpark. And yet we here have seen absolute dreck like SAP make such huge amounts of money. Our stuff is a bit of a learning curve, but it's abstraction for a reason, not just a conglomeration of crap. Our stuff makes sense and fits together. It's really architected, has inheritance in the modeling, the internals are clean, all that. We have very carefully focused on building the foundation blocks that we then put together into larger pieces, etcetera. We don't have this one-off approach.
But we never could sell anything to save our life. And our CEO at Synon really didn't understand our product. But in spite of that, we have done pretty well. I was dumbfounded to hear one of our top marketing guys tell me when he "resigned" that his job was to "take orders from customers". And he expounded from there. As a tech who has done sales and who has studied marketing and sales, I could not decide if I should laugh or cry.
All we need is some serious sales talent, and if they leave R&D alone, Sterling could float effortlessly for at least 4 years just on the strength of what we have now. And R&D was left alone. So they are doing the right things so far. They do know how to sell, and they have a big user base already that is different from ours.
So it seems like they have bought both top technology, and combining complementary customer bases. Even if they don't get new customers, they can hardly help but have sales field day seems to me. No-brainer. Since it looks like they are going to be continuing to build the product, the sky looks pretty blue. We have some pretty incredible productivity improvements over everybody else. AND we have controlled software development process as well. How can that miss? |
