Comment by newswasboring
13 hours ago
I have a general impression they are not interested too much in individual devs and making it suite their workflow. They want to be a B2B company and deliver a custom workflow per company.
Or it can just be a Google like problem where a big company one part doesn't talk to the other.
But wouldn't winning devs be a neat helping point in winning b2b contacts? Or they think golf courts are enough for success? Okay they might be right here, but still they make it so confusing for no obvious reason.
In my experience devs rarely have anything to say in B2B contracts. At best they can recommend a solution to the decision maker, but in almost all deals i was a part of they didn’t have any influence on the final decision. I wish it were otherwise but alas
> But wouldn't winning devs be a neat helping point in winning b2b contacts?
How? The largest providers that are trying to win devs are locked in a competition to get the devs to continue using the models for free!
The best way to win B2B contracts is to solve the problems that plague business, not those that plague devs. The devs are fickle, have no stickiness and will jump providers to the next free provider, to self-hosted, etc.
Selling to business using Mistral's approach is, I feel, just a good business plan.
"Giving away some credits for free, then making a loss on subscribers" is an absolutely terrible business plan.
As far as I understood the French president is pushing French most valuated companies to use Mistral. There can't be a more to down strategy :)
Also EU protectionism itself might be enough.
Like American protectionism? Heck, America even prohibits its own companies to sell to the government if the president doesn't like them enough.
Where is EU protectionist?
I feel we are way less protectionist than most other Economic Regions. Including the USA, which are very protectionist but always claim otherwise
10 replies →
To me it's obvious because the size of companies they are targeting (ASML being an obvious one). I think golf course marketing works well in the EU context when decisions are being made not purely on tech reasons.
> being made not purely on tech reasons.
As if that’s not true in the US (not just government contracts but VC in general as well)…
> I think golf course marketing works well in the EU context when decisions are being made not purely on tech reasons.
It's not like b2b sales is more technical merit based, individual contributor led, elsewhere.
It's always the same, depending on the field individual contributors can have some flexibility on picking tools (so a developer in a mid sized company would be able to pick whatever, an accountant probably would be more constrained, meanwhile a developer at a big bank would not have any choice). But for strategic software choices, that impact the whole company, where standardisation makes sense or is even mandatory to get actual value out of it, you need to sell to high level decision makers, not individual contributors. A CTO or a VP of X can decide to buy and mandate the implementation of something as impactful, workflow changing and potentially time and money saving as a company wide AI platform. A dev can't.
you might be correct. for example, they have an intellij plugin that allows integration without the AI Assistant, but it is only available for Enterprise customers