Darcy L. Watkins – September 15, 2024
In engineering, we strive for commoditization of our products, software, etc. We like everything to be orthogonal, configurable and we hate application specific hacks and kludges to our architecturally pure baby. The sales and support people, on the other hand, love it when we come up with “solutions” to make the end customers happy. One person’s kludge is another’s solution. I sometime spin this as the two characters Eeyore and Tigger. Eeyore laments the kludge but Tigger loves the solution.
The commodity product can only command a commodity price. People want more bang for the buck.
A product that offers solutions can command a premium price. The vendor gets more bucks for the bang.
The solutions, the business logic; that is the value proposition. The commodity part of the product is just the platform.