Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy is noted for his viewpoints on a variety of topics. One of my favorites is this: “The quality of a Company’s software has an inverse relationship to the amount of money spent on marketing.”
I often use this quote when speaking about our products and services as we try to be a function over form type of company. There are others like this, including Sybase. Sybase is not a household name vis a vis it’s database competitors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. However, it’s software runs some of the largest financial institutions along with our products.
Interestingly, Microsoft’s very popular SQL server was originally based on Sybase’s database (MS did a licensing deal with Sybase in the 1990’s. I wonder if Sybase would do that again today?)
Sybase is taking a bit more of an aggressive posture with small business opportunities. They now have a free linux version available. There are some limitations on this product (memory and database size), but for many projects, it’s potentially great place to start.
Free doesn’t pay the bills, so they do need to have a realistic glide path from “free” for a low end implementation to a pricing model that small businesses can actually afford. These are interesting times for many tech firms.