You can't win every contracts but the market we're after is immense and so even a small percentage of enterprises being more daring is sufficient.
But the argument is true for any enterprise software, you cannot be small and sell to enterprise (or you must have amazing product market fit), that's where open-source comes in.
We have overlap with many existing products, but we are the only one to provide such product, with emphasis on DX and excellent performance and scalability, and to be open-source. We do currently have a few big enterprise customers and many enterprise open-source users. It's a lot easier to get approval since they get it for free and it's fully self-hostable and air-grappable. Once they have tried it on a few non-essential workflow and see the benefits, then they are more motivated to make a case internally. Wide net, some catches until it becomes ubiquitous.
I happen to be a really strong believer in open-source so it's not just an adoption strategy but I think it happens to be also fortunately the best strategy for such infra level software.
Whether enterprise or not, the criticism is still fair: the value proposition needs to be super clear. I’m missing this.
Your comments make it a bit more clear, but the big question (as an Airflow user) I have is: why would I want to migrate?
A big question for an enterprise customer is typically: will I save money with this? In developer productivity, in resource costs, or something else? Can you unlock new things that were previously not possible?
Question is - what are you using airflow for? My experience with airflow have been in data ETL, and if so you are not the target for something like windmill.
The target would most likely be automating HR, Finance and IT workflows and tearing down the shadow IT web of crazy integrations taking place at every larger organization I’ve ever experienced.
We’re talking “new hire” workflow for example, which at my current employer is about 25 activities in a workflow.
All assets have to be lifecycle managed in an enterprise and automated workflows will help you scale that. Far too many enterprises have a lot of people shuffle excel files and emails around to fulfill processes and workflows.
Airflow is a beast imho and usually not used in the same niche IME.
Just guessing with no background experience on windmill, maybe to support reactive workflows. Airflow does not have a good proposition on that front. Sensors are a workaround and not performant.
A problem is that you're trading 'Compete by offering one thing this company needs' with 'Compete by offering 5 things this company needs, 4 of which are in various stages of entrenchment at the organization already'.
You'll be up against incumbent software that populates teams of workers at the company who have a vested interest in their livelihoods not being taken away, who have the support of whatever commercial organization wants to keep their business. All to provide that +1 value-add you can't even focus on as much as you should due to your efforts being split to compete with multiple other products.
Do one thing well, FIRST. Make it easy to integrate with and build integrations from. THEN expand into the supporting ecosystem.
But the argument is true for any enterprise software, you cannot be small and sell to enterprise (or you must have amazing product market fit), that's where open-source comes in.
We have overlap with many existing products, but we are the only one to provide such product, with emphasis on DX and excellent performance and scalability, and to be open-source. We do currently have a few big enterprise customers and many enterprise open-source users. It's a lot easier to get approval since they get it for free and it's fully self-hostable and air-grappable. Once they have tried it on a few non-essential workflow and see the benefits, then they are more motivated to make a case internally. Wide net, some catches until it becomes ubiquitous.
I happen to be a really strong believer in open-source so it's not just an adoption strategy but I think it happens to be also fortunately the best strategy for such infra level software.