Comment by soco
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
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
Well different discussion, but look at the Mercosur agreement and all the opposition from farmers in the EU. They are extremely protectionist when it comes to agriculture, at least.
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Well, if every big company gets a giant EU fine for, say, preinstalling a web browser in an OS, except for EU companies, that could make it easier for the EU companies.
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Apparently you aren't aware of the EU's deep regulatory protectionism and subsidies at both EU and country level. A small portion is legitimately about protecting consumers, but ultimately this stuff is all designed by and for EU industry.
Basically all economic regions get highly protectionist when it comes to key areas like agriculture, banking, steel production, energy, automotive manufacturing, etc.
On tariffs, the US is now higher, but tariffs are a tax that passes through overwhelmingly onto the consumer (by like 95%+). Given there's essentially no fully domestic US manufacturing supply chains and the US imports everything, it's a defacto VAT from the perspective of the consumer. The EU has VAT levels that are still much higher than the average US tariff level, which is a essentially a dampener on consumption.
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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.