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Re: 9.0 Community User Interface

by
rvalyi@akretion.com
- 24/11/2015 15:33:16
<OT>

@Nhomar

Akretion is probably among the top 15 worldwide partners who sold the most Enterprise contracts in value to Odoo SA these last 6 years. Still what is the long term benefit of that? Nearly nothing. Since 2011 they made it clear that if you decrease the money stream just a little bit they will try to screw you make us loose R&D investment worth hundreds of USD to illude themselves with companies that never last more than 1 year on this market and bringing them only a fraction of such investment... It became a sick addiction for little real service and added value... Today the system is sick...

I mean today we see that we do better as company investing in our own marketing than killing our margin to sell Enterprise contracts for no long term strategy. That could have been different but this is the way it is sadly and the trend is not getting any better.

And don't tell me it's because we dare ranting. There are dozens of partners who never rant and got screwed in silent. Take former gold partners like Julius in France. They sold many Enterprise contracts, never rant a tenth of what I do and they got screwed and aren't a partner anymore. The point is we don't play that game to be a mere victim and it will take what it will take in ranting to make it. We are the bad asses.

You say: "if we all buy the Enterprise contract and...". Man, when we all started with TinyERP/OpenERP that was a true FLOSS project with expertise valued and no Enterprise price tag. We could invest on making what s probably the most complex OCA localization today (Brazil) and what took millions for SAP to achieve. And we did sold that hell Enterprise thing. We even started a very successful venture in France where it's easier to feed them with that money than a developing country like Brazil...

But today, Odoo SA wants us to sell an Enterprise thing that is closed source and that is at the very least 5 times more expensive than the famous local competition and this without including the cost of support for the localization which is clearly where the most of the work has to be done. I'm not telling 50% more expensive, I'm telling 5 times more expensive. You could argue "Odoo is customizable and blablabla". Well I'm here telling about the scalable offer that is the out of the box product that doesn't require you to compete with the richest Brazilian companies to hire the 1% of skilled engineers who could indeed customize your product.

I'm not going to loose my precious time spending hours on phone with an account manager to try to get a 30% Enterprise discount contract by contract when the price tage is 5x too expensive and when the whole Enterprise direction is going against the history toward proprietary software. We will still make very occasional Enterprise sell if that is a Publisher Warranty and if they can negociate. But sadly this is a marginal business.


There are alternatives!!

I tell you: this web CMS thing is going nowhere, it will explode along with the Odoo open source business. Still it probably costed them a big pie of their VC investment (half the money?) and is certainly responsible for the situation where they are now which seems to be the walk toward proprietary software.

I believe open source is about making bridges between existing free things rather than re-inventing the wheel. Both the web stack and the CMS stack are free if you consider stuff like Django, Rails or LocomotiveCMS (that one can be plugged with Odoo). Even a large part of e-commerce is free and open source when you consider all the modular top notch quality R&D published under MIT license by Shopify https://github.com/Shopify
This was just about making these easy fucking bridges...

Oh yes, your product will be less sexy; less packaged...
But hell what difference does it makes if the sexy packed web Odoo product is going to die as an open source product and is going to be totally non competitive as a proprietary product?

I'm ranting for years because of all that money smoked into that web stack. Well, I still believe the bubble burst will give me reason. Bet taken my friend.

At the end of the day:
  • Odoo SA only had to be a sustainable ERP core editor playing it nice with extension editors being partners or the OCA
  • they didn't had to sell their soul to the devil in exchange of VC $$ to try to re-invent a web stack to try to make their users somewhat captive
Today, the OCA "only" has to maintain the core and its 800 modules. And I really see t working fully open source as long as we don't try to re-invent the wheel either. Because re-inventing the wheel costs a lot...

This is just like if Shopify would borrow hundreds of millions to try to re-invent a full blown ERP to put inside their shop. Most likely what will VC's want in exchange of these millions would make them crash just like Odoo SA may crash for trying to re-invent a web stack instead of focusing on what they did relatively well.

Weren't you once the "lean product" guy?

This might sound a bit rough but all in all I'm VERY optimistic about the Odoo product and the OCA foundation and us Akretion. Here I just wanted to tell that it's not a problem anymore of all of us selling the Enterprise thing. The system has gone sick and I'm not going to shoot myself in the feet anymore for something that will make no difference at this stage because it all became a finance game between VC cash and company valuation. You could kill you selling 50 Enterprise contracts that makes no difference anymore. Better kill us making the OCA succeed as we are doing already.

</OT>

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 5:53 AM, Nhomar Hernandez <nhomar@vauxoo.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 10:53 PM, Luis Felipe Miléo <mileo@kmee.com.br> wrote:
For example the picture above is a instance with sale, purchase, project, hr and some website modules.

<img src="cid:f63a1d0ab719a984ffceb33b2395f24aff886f34@zimbra" data-mce-src="cid:f63a1d0ab719a984ffceb33b2395f24aff886f34@zimbra">

Compared to v8 we have a big increase of top menus and blue link of "Dashboard" (for eg: https://github.com/odoo/odoo/blob/db68f9c4be6f8b09a4445df5f8ff55312c6fb377/addons/project/project_view.xml#L588)

I am agreed (not against your point).

But an issue should be more useful than a generic complain (well that's my opinion)

On my side in an organized way I tested several features (almost all community ones) on new sales and purchase processes and all of them where answered (even if not solved because some conceptual differences between my point of view and theirs).

My point is that if you have specific complains about usability on community edition, instead say "it is because the enterprise" In you plac I should prepare a document with all points and try to 1.- Solve my self. 2.- Discuss one by one with odoo SA.

IOH (commercially and strategically speaking), completly OT, you can stop read here if you do not want read a flame.

We (as community) are the gulties of push odoo SA to close more and more... and our customers also, just because we "think" we deserve the "community edition" we have years fighting against a mega-monster which is the "investment", IMHO if every single one of us buy and enterprise or a partnership in the community Odoo will have better profit and better income.... but now the bad is done... simply Buy closed or Live on community....

And listen well, I am talking about "We" not complaining about others I am part of this community and I supose I made some errors also.

Fabien was very clear, he changed his mind a lot since the begining, and being honest, may be me in Fabien's shoes should do the same.

When you invest millions in something and simply people think they "deserve" my job just because "yes, I do!" I should take the same position.

Today we continue working so hard to stay open, but mantain >500 modules + OCA one's + community Odoo's edition needs to be paid, and I do not find other way that sale the "right" to receive support and access....

Do you know another way?

And read carefully, it is not a matter of open or closed (I think Open) it is a matter of "who pays for what and when".

Regards.

--
Nhomar Hernandez
CEO Vauxoo.
Twitter: @nhomar
Odoo Gold Partner
Móvil Venezuela:
+58 4144110269
Móvil México:
+52 1 4773933942

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Raphaël Valyi
Founder and consultant
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