But there are decades of precedent against how much people will pay for email.
Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email?
Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees.
Thats the problem with enterprise scaling vs cloud/startup scaling. They are inverse;
The enterprise wants the cost per unit to go down when scaling. The startup/cloud wants the profitability to increase at the same rate when scaling.
We all want great services, but NOBODY wants to pay for it.
I myself seek to offload cost at every opportunity; work pays for machine, phone, travel, software etc...
Same model.
Yeah - I'll seek to solve problems I have, but not based on how much I would pay - but how much I would like to offload that cost.
(Clearly there is a lot of grey here, and there are areas where this doesn't make sense -- and others where it does -- and these are not mutually exclusive. (i.e. in areas where I am both building for the consumer and the provider (healthcare))
"Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email?
Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees."
Yes, I certainly do believe that any American corporation with 150K employees spends significantly more than $7.5mm/year on their messaging system.
These systems actually get _more_ expensive as they grow larger - Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Sarbanes Oxley, Customer Service, SLAs, Data Loss Protection, Intrusion Detection - All these email services that the small enterprise doesn't worry about (that much) - add up significantly in larger enterprises.
Lockheed is a horrible example too because they have extensive classified operations (their support costs for email within classified projects probably exceed 7.5mm alone), and because Lockheed IS&GS is a major contractor for outsourced IT services.
I think the Gartner figure was something on the order of $500-1000/yr per employee for messaging in large high tech businesses. A lot of that is IT staff, and all the other systems for security and compliance. Email is one of the big apps within enterprise.
Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email?
Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees.
Thats the problem with enterprise scaling vs cloud/startup scaling. They are inverse;
The enterprise wants the cost per unit to go down when scaling. The startup/cloud wants the profitability to increase at the same rate when scaling.
We all want great services, but NOBODY wants to pay for it.
I myself seek to offload cost at every opportunity; work pays for machine, phone, travel, software etc...
Same model.
Yeah - I'll seek to solve problems I have, but not based on how much I would pay - but how much I would like to offload that cost.
(Clearly there is a lot of grey here, and there are areas where this doesn't make sense -- and others where it does -- and these are not mutually exclusive. (i.e. in areas where I am both building for the consumer and the provider (healthcare))