Matthew, Ben and Gianugo have been chatting recently about open source business plans, as a result of Matthew's shortlist of do's for an open source services company. Matthew seems to be hopeful his company is doing the right thing, while as Gianugo has some reservations as to whether business plans should go the full monty or not. Gianugo is afraid about freeriders, and folks (competitors!) being able to read (and abuse) information which is normally held behind the confines of the firewall.
Apart from truly original (product!) concepts, I can't be too worried about competion running away with our price jewels, since much of what we do is either a) open source anyhow, so go and read the source, b) not suitable for commercial use for someone who hasn't been riding alongside us for the past three years, or c) pretty atypical for us specifically, but very typical for any consultancy company out there, so if you can't figure out that part you might as well do something else.
What ties consulting companies to their customers is loyalty, driven primarily by trust. If there's anything which is hard to recreate for an eager copycat, it is the long-term relationship with customers, which established players should have. While I'm sure some of the SpikeSources out there might be successful, I don't think they should be afraid of competition copying their business plans. But whether styleful blogging, memical correctness and VC will buy them customer's trust, that's another story. The blogosphere is no place to buy business credentials, I'm afraid.
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