On value

What precisely is it people buy … is it a box full of parts they assemble themselves, or a service, or a turnkey solution? What they buy comes fundamentally from where they believe value to be. The buyer of boxes full of parts have value pegged to inverse of price. The lower the price the higher the value. The buyer of a service or a solution is looking for a specific set of expectations to be met. The value is pegged to the amount of pain removed, or the ability to reallocate resources to other projects. E.g. the value is labor saving. Performance engineering falls in the regime of labor saving. Not everyone can slap together a box and have it run fast. Actually many don’t come anywhere near the performance that they could if they knew what they needed to know to make it happen. That is, there is value in the knowledge.

Among other places. So imagine if, as a provider of systems and solutions that incorporate these value elements, someone asks you to give them all this value for free. So as to reduce the value equation to the inverse of price, to enable an “apples to apples” comparison. This shows me, if we get into these conversations, that we aren’t communicating our value correctly to these customers, or they simply have no interest in these elements. Performance is an enabling technology. There is value in this.