Enterprise sales cycle is EXPENSIVE, so, while the actual cost of your service may be much less, you have to pay for the ten airplane flights and meetings and hotel rooms before you close your sale (and add a few one afterwards for good measure).
"Enterprise-focused VC’s sometimes refer to products priced between (roughly) $5k and $100K as falling in the “valley of death.” Above $100K, you might be able to make a profit given the cost of sales. Below $5k you might be able to market your product, hence have a very low cost of sales"
I'm not sure if all of that advice applies to a Ruby gem... big freaking enterprises don't use Ruby that much.
Does that point stands when people can freely start using the software, and enterprises decide to buy support because they are already using the product?
Somehow all that process must work for buying paper clips and pencils. Yeah, they buy those in huge amounts, but I can not conceive that they pay much of a premium. I know that governments have streamlined process for those situations. Don't corportations also have shorter procedures?
> big freaking enterprises don't use Ruby that much.
Of course not. Ruby is slow, dynamic, and uses a ton of magic. Ruby is inherently more suited to smaller developers, who can use it to generate code, run scripts, embed it in things, and make use of the magic to be productive (things like generating C++, Fortran, or HTML).
Firstly, I am not a huge fan of Ruby, but ruby isn't magic itself, just Rails, which is a piece of crap.
Secondly, 'big enterprises' tend to employ a lot of mediocre or poor developers, and as a result have gigantic code bases to do more poorly what might be done with 1/100th as much code. You say Ruby devs use 'magic' like code generation. Big Enterprises use copy and paste.
Also, in case you woke up from a coma, it's not 1997 and everyone generates HTML. What do you think 'big enterprises' do? Type the same header into 50 million pages?
Ruby itself may not be magic but it encourages magic frameworks which end up extremely hard to maintain under turnover. I guess part of the problem is that when you have a couple of smart developers they try to outdo each other in the cleverness of their code, so it essentially ends up being write-only software.
> Firstly, I am not a huge fan of Ruby, but ruby isn't magic itself, just Rails, which is a piece of crap.
I'll agree that Rails is crap, but Ruby most definitely isn't.
There's some interesting stuff going on in the Ruby world, mostly coming out of Japanese universities and research institutes. And Ruby certainly does have bits of magic, which is why it's so easy to write DSLs and code generators... Not saying other languages can't do it, but in Ruby everything is made pretty easy.
