Our company is a small company, a micro ISV as they call it and naturally the market segment we market and advertise to and who usually respond are small companies themselves. These small companies cater for the bulk of our business.
However as the days go by I see a very strange trend. It seems man hour rates for programming seem to be the only criteria for winning a BID, not infrastructure, not expertise, not experience , it always seems to boil down only to price. !!! The cheaper you are ..the better chance it is to win the bids.
Now there are so many of us offering the same programming services , with the same level of expertise, our websites look the same, we have the same things to say so I suppose the company wanting to outsource some programming work goes to google, send emails to 10-15 companies like us.. gets the quotes and gives the order to the lowest bidder.
This whole scenario reminds me of a vegetable market in our area. When you enter there is a line of vegetable vendors having baskets of vegetables in front of them. As you walk past them , each one tries to sell thier vegetables to you, shouting the prices and trying to outbid each other. All have the same kind of baskets, the same quality of vegetables so in the end you will naturally buy the cheapest. Sound familiar doesnt it !!
The software companies are the vegetable vendors with their basket of vegetables yelling away prices to a customer. Pity such high skill sets across companies like ours are caught in a situation such as this. We have been blinded by the short term profits of coding services which everyone can do and have not implemented a sustained effort of acquiring and upgrading knowledge in a particular domain.
Soon there will be cheaper vegetable vendors and we will be out of work.
