Being a services person inside of a product company means that you’re always going to be an odd duck.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Services — by which I mean training, support, and especially consulting — are just different than products. They are sold differently, they are built differently, they are delivered differently, they’re just different. And this sometimes leads to misunderstandings at a product company.<\/p>\n
Financially, software development requires upfront investment to develop the product and then hopefully long streams of high margin revenue with low incremental and on-going costs.<\/p>\n
Professional services, on the other hand, don’t require the big upfront investment but they have high direct (mostly people) costs associated with them that make the margins look bad to a product software person.<\/p>\n
Also, those services don’t just deliver themselves; you have to put those meat bodies on planes and fly them around timespace. And if you have too many meatbodies at a given time, that’s still going to cost you. On the other hand, if you don’t have enough at a given time for the work at hand, that’s also going to cost you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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