Re: Draft 2 of Direction Statement

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

Hi Chris;

The clarification was just intended to specify that the LedgerSMB
project is targetting small to midsize businesses for now.  This was
always part of the plan.  I was just unclear in my description.

My own feeling is that most ERP software (both large and small) is
inadequate, hard to use, etc.   (Have you ever seen someone struggle
to input a purchase order in SAP?  I have...  Not pretty....) I think
that as long as we engineer the software with the idea that people may
need to re-use it in other environments, we will find that eventually,
we are able to do a better job than the major players.

One additional point I haven't seen discussed is that focusing on the
SMB market with the idea that the program should always do the right
thing accounting-wise means that we are forced to deal with some
problems that SAP, et. al, don't have to deal with.  These problems
include streamlined workflow, ease of use, etc.  And by dealing with
these problems effectively we can offer the following advantages over
existing existing SMB solutions:

1)  If workflow is separated from mechanism, then we don't have to
rely on the bad accounting habits that people pick up with Quickbooks
and Peachtree.

2)  For the slightly larger applications (competing with Dynamics,
etc), we can offer the advantages of ease of use typically only found
in the low-end products.

This is possible because, as a community, we can interact with the
end-user in ways that Intuit and Microsoft can't on the small-scale
level, and in ways that are impossible in the large scale with
businesses like SAP and Oracle.  So I actually don't think we should
even lose the SMB focus even as additional functionality gets added
and we move to other markets.

Hope this helps,
Chris Travers