Speed

No, this is not a publicity for the movie.

What is one of the biggest advantages a MicroISV or Small ISV has over big software corporations? That's right. I think is speed. Is the capacity of getting good software out to the market in a small time frame. And why this could be an advantage?

If we take a look back in time, one of the reasons software products loose the battle to other products is because speed. Take a look at Internet Explorer vs. Netscape some years ago. One of the biggest flow with Netscape was their ability to take new versions quickly to the market. If my memory don't cheat me, back in that time you could see a new version of IE almost every six months, and with a ton of new features. This is pretty quick for a company as big as Microsoft. If Netscape could figure out a way to build new versions quicker and rival IE, maybe it could have had a chance. Of course, you cannot only take this factor into account, but I think is one of them.

Take also a look at Project Aardvark, of FogCreek Software, they manage to build a product, market it and take to the clients in almost three months. That's pretty a quick step. Big software companies can not take this luxury. But, by the time, they are making money out of it.

With Procx for example, we are able to add activities that business processes uses very fast and in a standard way. For example, we needed to add the capability to use SharePoint Document Library fields (columns) inside the process for making decisions. We added this functionality in a week and customers are the ones getting the benefit of this.

Another good thing about speed is the ability to easily adapt to changing environments and technology. Taking a product to work in other operating systems like Mac o Linux is no easy task but been small ISV's things are different.

So you can say speed in small ISV's is a competitive advantage. They can increase the amount of innovation they put in the hands of customers at rate higher than other software companies. It's like getting there by plane and letting the others get there by car.