[mntmoss]

I'm pretty sure there's room for smaller verticals these days. It's been demonstrated many times that if you have the best front-end to the problem space, and you add some services on top, everything under it can be totally commodified but you'll still get customers.

From there the strategy would depend on whether you want to stay small or not: To get bigger, you'd start going deeper into the open stack to scale things up and provide a wider array of services. If you stay small, your organization will necessarily be more focused on interfaces and compatibility while maintaining that top-end UX. In both instances there are plays for open source, but with different characters; the big company will tend to code-dump an enterprise toolchain, the small one will primarily be a contributor to a foundation project or open some of their internal interfaces.

[cutemonster]

> It's been demonstrated many times that if you have the best front-end to the problem space, and you add some services on top, everything under it can be totally commodified but you'll still get customers.

Examples please? (I might be in that situation)