Brilliant people and competent people

I've just read an article about commercial software vs. open source software. For open source software, those users are expected to have much knowledge in problem solving. For commercial software, you would definitely rely on vendor to solve your problem. Unfortunately, my experience tells me they always fail or they cannot provide you a best solution. Interesting, but I don't admit it as mentioned in the article that commercial vendor is likely to make simple problem harder to solve and so telling you they are the only one who can solve the problem. Well, it gives a good reason to use and buy their software.

I worked in two GIS vendors before. I think this could be one of the strategies to sell, and it should be a good one. However, to use this strategy you should have a idiot customer and they do have much money in their pocket willing to spend as well. Recalling my experience, there is an example in my mind. Vendor A solution became obsolete and that vendor B approached them. However, Vendor B didn't has solution and still made the deal.

To build a system, you have to solve many difficult problem technically or psychologically. What I mean psychologically is about people management. Anyway, I agree with the writer of the article that there are two kinds of people and there is a very nice division of work.

For hard/difficult problem, we need a lot of people to solve it, right? The answer is "No". We need a few brilliant people to solve hard problem, and we need a lot of competent people to implement solution. As in very large map database company likes the most biggest one in the world, just only a few brilliant people can control definition of database scheme, design and workflow, the reminding tasks would be done by a pool of competent Engineering people.

Having a crowd of developers with no clue what to do is just ineffective and definitely more costly. Having a few developers with a strong sense of direction is what we are striving for.

In any case, when choosing software, do think, do research, not just hear what the Sales and Marketing people tell you.

Do "Think" is much useful than hard working and this is the difference between brilliance and competence.

Comparison Between Open Source and Commercial Software