Marketing Strategies Could Be Improved with the Help of Insights from Infrastructure Solutions

Many software solutions are marketed in specific ways and through pointed avenues to show off their open source flair. The article, "Open Source is a Feature Not a Benefit," decries this is unnecessary. The author Dan Thornton believes that no one sees this as enough of a benefit to care about it.

Potential customers want to hear the benefits a product can bring to their organization. They only care about the features if placed in the context of the rewards and opportunities these aspects will enable.

Differing from mainstream audiences, Thornton himself sees huge benefits from open source projects:

I’m a big advocate of opening up as a necessary way for companies to operate and grow in the future. Having open code means projects don’t die because one company or one developer quits. It allows brilliant people around the world to get involved and means that the end users can find someone who can work with that code relatively easily. It means that things can exist and grow in ways the creators may never have imagined, and can produce weird and varied offshoots.

He still advocates pleasing the masses who are unaware of the opportunities and customization open source allows. Understanding audience requires a certain amount of wisdom, and perhaps insight-enabling infrastructure solutions can guide marketing teams to that place.

Megan Feil, July 13, 2012