Comment by mamcx

> the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software

In fact, the realization is that the market buy support.

And that includes google and other companies that lack much of human support.

This is the key.

Support is manifested in many ways:

* There is information about it (docs, videos, blogs, ...)

* There is people that help me ('look ma, this is how you use google')

* There is support for the thing I use ('OS, Browser, Formats, ...')

* And for my way of working ('Excel let me do any app there...')

* And finally, actual people (that is the #1 thing that keep alive even the worst ERP on earth). This also includes marketing, sales people, etc. This are signal of having support even if is not exactly the best. If I go to enterprise and only have engineers that will be a bad signal, because well, developers then to be terrible at other stuff and the other stuff is support that matters.

If you have a good product, but there is not support, is dead.

And if you wanna fight a worse product, is smart to reduce the need to support for ('bugs, performance issues, platforms, ...') for YOUR TEAM because you wanna reduce YOUR COSTS but you NEED to add support in other dimensions!

The easiest for a small team, is just add humans (that is the MOST scarce source of support). After that, it need to be creative.

(also, this means you need to communicate your advantages well, because there is people that value some kind of support more than others 'have the code vs propietary' is a good example. A lot prefer the proprietary with support more than the code, I mean)