Game in the Brain

After realizing frappe is low code, python, and js, web base ERP. I realized that when I saw the majority of the users were African and South Asian, my irrational instinct is that this is where I belong. It’s probably racist to think we were all the same – we need an Erp but we can only afford time and effort and we were cash strapped.

When I went to Las Vegas, a “free trip” to a Dell conference I didn’t feel like I belonged there. Everyone there don’t feel the same cost constraints as I do. I just need to remind myself the. BPO data that their average salaries are 200-400k php a month while ours is 24k. Their needs are different, the reason why I only have Google as my paid propriety stuff is becuase Google costs 300php and the rest I opensource. These guys dont think about buying a server license 32k or a professional license of 10k. They don’t blink at VMware 20k usd a year etc…

Benchmarks 

1. 1usd = 50php
2. IT salary average in Philippines (5 years experience) 500usd/mo or 25k Php. 
3. IT salary in the developed world  (mode, not median) 1,600usd/mo or 80,000php/mo

3rd worlders think in much lower thresholds of cost, how much days food that would be. We are far closer to the bottom to think about basic needs. Expensive tech requires more infra and reliability we do not have access to or can afford. 

I wish I can blog this in my LinkedIn and signal “sorry we’re not the client you are looking for, we’re third worlders”. Our company may have bit defender, gsuites, and fortinet firewall but that’s pretty much it. We have to open source stuff and configure it. 

Gsuites is something I did a lot of cost-benefit around, and to match it means having Network and Security Skills we don’t have, to be cheaper is also Network and security skills we don’t have. Currently, we were scammed paying x2 (30k USD or 700k PHP) when we can get a similar service for half in Fortinet. and Even Less with Netgate (Makers of PFsense). They are not apples to apples, its this lower grade apple we can afford vs this higher grade one we can’t afford. 

Because of the pandemic, I get more hits in my LinkedIn than before but it’s more polite to ignore that people than point out We are not your target market.

My total cost of IT is 5M a year and it’s limited as you can imagine. That’s 7 leased lines, 250 Gsuite users , and various IT things that other companys would not think is a “cost” (they out in in the books of Operations and not IT) . I get annoyed by MS being caught in my open-source algorithm being an Open source champion pouring money to that marketing – fuck them. They were and there when I was a starving and unemployed and they can go fuck themselves.