EntreDigm   Consulting, LLC    Better Software Strategies for Better Software Businesses  3348 SW Chintimini Avenue   Corvallis, Oregon 97333   Phone: (541) 757-7194  Fax:     (541) 757-7193  Email:  consult@entredigm.com

Better Strategy Means Better Business

EntreDigm provides business and product strategy consulting to principals of software companies, and hands-on workshops for their product teams to enhance product strategy and product planning skills.  We assist qualified angel and venture capital investors in evaluating product and business strategies of software companies seeking investment.

Today's software markets are swift, tough, and devious.  Don't guess around with your company's future.  There's a much better way.  Contact EntreDigm Consulting today for a free initial consultation.
 
 

EntreDigm consultations are especially recommended if your company is:

• Searching for a more competitive multi-release product strategy
• Trying to break out of a competitive leap-frog with your competitors
• Wanting to launch or repulse a competitive attack
• Considering how to value and position your software for the PC market
• Concerned about how to compete with Microsoft and dominant software firms
• Trying to supercharge or revive a software product
• Planning to build a software business out of your existing core competency
• Seeking to increase your software business planes attractiveness to potential investors

The software paradigm is changing.  Software as a business is becoming the primary sustainable software creation mechanism.  But this mechanism is not well understood and has not been well studied.  The computer science literature is relatively useless for understanding how to create software in an economically sustainable fashion.  To do so you have to look beyond how to get more software out of each engineer.  You have to focus on how to get more customers into your software.

 

Software is team thought.  It is highly reflective of the organization that makes it.  Software companies are made or broken by how they think.

 

Great  software, like great thought, cannot be manufactured.  The outmoded  Software Factory efficiency paradigm didn't help Japan to dominate global software markets, and it won't help your firm to do so either.

 

A more successful strategy to fight high costs of software development is to amortize them across a  much broader customer base.  This allows you  to offer a lower purchase price, and therefore higher delivered value.  But success of this strategy depends on how well your organization understands how high-volume markets perceive software value.  The conventional view that software value derives mainly from internalities, such as features or quality, is dangerously blind to the critical externalities that affect actual perceived value.  These include the rate of change, the appeal of its direction, and network externalities.

 

As the global computing platforms become unified, affordable, pervasive and scalable, the potential breadth of software markets is soaring.  The attractive economics  of high-volume or "commodity" software is now a fiercely competitive force affecting all aspects of today's software markets.

 

Even a high-end niche software product is now vulnerable to damaging competitive attack by a less-featured commodity competitor that dissipates market demand and shifts how software is used by that market.  If you don't think your software firm will be affected, think again.

AIM

Effective strategic planning requires an understanding of how software market structure evolves.  Economists have shown that generally in a high-tech market,  a small cluster of companies will come to dominate.  These  are the ones which aim, or organize them- selves, most effectively to follow their long-term vision of the technology's evolution.

 

Market leadership, however, is unstable.  A competitor can dethrone the  leaders, regardless of its size, if it aims at a more correct long-term term vision of the technology's trajectory.

 

In today's commodity software markets successful products are managed as an evolving release portfolio that exhibits a compelling theme and trajectory to recruit and orient customer demand.

SHIFT

 PC Software companies, however, show strong first- mover advantages.  With proper strategy, software can shift its trajectory in compelling new directions that reorient demand away from competitors' trajectories.

 

The most effective leaders in commodity software markets don't just set an unmatchable pace of change.  They not only try to turn the steering wheel, they try to turn the road ahead.

 

If you think this can't happen with your software firm, think again.

 

Then give EntreDigm Consulting a call for a free initial consultation.  We provide consultation and training services listed below on a fee, performance, option or retainer basis.

Business Planning

• Business Plan Analysis
• Organizational Processes Analysis

Software Product Planning

• Product Strategy
• Strategy-Wise Product Naming
• Marketing Plan Analysis
• Internet Promotion Planning
• Product Support Planning

Venture Capital Due Diligence

• Business Plan Assessment
• Product Strategy Assessment

Personnel Training

• Shift Happens! ™ Workshop

General

• Strategic Consulting
• Project Management

 
 

Frank Hall
Founder and President of EntreDigm Consulting LLC
Frank has more than 25 years experience in software development, management and research.  He specializes in product strategies for high-volume markets. Previously he served Hewlett-Packard for 12 years as an R&D project manager in the development and support of open systems workstation graphical user interface software, including the Motif and X Window technologies which became Unix industry standards. His research in the mid-1990s into software product success strategies led him to leave Hewlett-Packard and launch EntreDigm Consulting to help software companies succeed.  He has published in IEEE Software and the HP Journal, and has delivered talks on user interface tools and productivity at professional conferences. He has substantial graduate education in Computer Science from Oregon State University, an MS degree in Anthropology from the University of Texas, and a BA in Mathematics from Florida State University. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon with his wife and two children, ages 8 and 3.