Change Your Pricing

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Chris Brogran tweeted about a Seth Godin post about what happens to companies when they change their pricing.

I thought it was great, so I figured that it would relate to SharePoint in some way or another.   :-)

"When a restaurant goes from a la carte to either a buffet or a fixed price meal, it is able to find a new class of customers."

So, how does changing your price relate to SharePoint? Well, If you think like an ISV, then you are thinking 2-3 years ahead, with a product lifespan of 5-10, maybe 15 or more years, right? So, let's look ahead a little bit.

Are you thinking about what will happen when SharePoint Hosting is the natural order of things? What happens when enterprises only install SharePoint into their own data centers to handle their own internal, most business critical documents, and many, if not all external-facing workloads and partner- and customer-facing workloads are running on cloud-hosted SharePoint data center farms?

How will companies that provide software using today's pricing models convert to the new realities? How will existing per-transaction models translate to SharePoint? Will they? Of course they will, it's just a matter of which companies are going to lead the others there.

What will your new SharePoint pricing model be? What will the "new class of customers," that your business/service will attract, consist of?

How many Hosting providers will choose to provide custom versions of SharePoint – versions that tie together multiple ISV Solutions and offer a compound solution that slays the competition?

"Changing your pricing changes your story."

The line between consumers and business is blurring. Just as the iPhone is changing the way that consumers use mobile phones, and at the same time is meeting almost all of the needs of enterprise users, the "class of customers" that a SharePoint–oriented ISV or service provider should be focusing on is also changing. As we (SharePoint service providers) learn lessons from the consumer world and start to mix it up, it's going to be fun.

Remember, "It CAN Be Done."