Normally when you think of a Co-Operative (co-op), you think of a farmers or some other community co-op. People create co-ops so that they join together with a common business to produce or supply a services, operated by its members with the profits and losses shared by the menbers as well. Could an ERP software co-operative work and be profitable?
Software companies strugle with a number of issues on a daily basis - mainly because of the way that they are structured:
- Limited development resources means that extensions and improvements to the products need to be prioritized and cut
- Customers do not always feeling that they ware being heard and their specific needs are not being addressed
- Retaining customers and maintenance is administratively burdonsome
- Managing 3rd Party developers and partners.
In an economy based on sharing, could these be overcome through a co-op structure?
If customers become shareholders in the organization, and are also given the opportunity to contribute in the development of the product though internal open source where everyone who owns a copy of the product and shares information on what they are doing, then the centralized development model, and the bottleneck of having a limited number of developers becomes less important. As a co-op, it is in the best interests of the members to share their extensions, and also extend out the product. The co-op would just provide a mechanism for managing those extensions, and also have a small development staff that can create the extensions to the products that the members do not have the time, or the skillsets to do.
As a collective, then there is no reason why the customers are not getting their needs addressed. Rather than having one organization benevolently dictating what new features and needs get addressed, there are many mini-development groups all contributing to the product and providing real world applications. As the network of customers grow, the development resources and insights shouild grow quickly as well.
Having a vested interest in the software as well incentivises the customers to be good co-op citizens as well. Because the whole premise of the co-operative is that they will share in the profits and losses of the co-op, then it is in their best interest to keep the product as profitable as possible. With that said, the central co-op administrators have a stake in this as well, and need to stay as lean as possible so that they don't drain away any unneccessary profits as well. A maintenance loss to the co-operative is a loss to the collective group, so a supportive and constructive community is key.
The final question is how to address 3rd party developers and consultants. How will these people get access to the product to learn it, and to develop on it. There is no reason why they cannot be included in the co-op structure. They can easily purchase a single user co-operative share, and as a result become vested members in the community.
Could an ERP Software Co-Operative work? I don't know...