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As I’ve been consulting companies of all sizes and talking to folks within many age groups I’ve started to see what may be a trend in regards to pricing model and ages. Older folks seem to have an aversion against open source technologies, younger folks have the exact opposite aversion against commercial technologies. All the while, SaaS seems to have no age preference but one of corporate size.

Older folks tend to have in their minds the adage “you get what you pay for”. They’ve seen price correlation between product development stage and cost. Some folks even think that the most expensive product must be the best product and instantly want to purchase that product. When open source technology is brought up there is an instant confusion and disregard.

Younger folks seem to have in their mind a vision of an evil corporation. No matter what it is, if it has a price tag, some younger folks will balk at it and think to themselves, “there’s got to be an open source project that does the same thing”. When commercial technologies are brought up, even if fairly priced, some young folks will not hear another word.

When it comes to the SaaS pricing model, there seems to me to be less of an age based correlation but rather a corporate size correlation. Larger companies tend to avoid SaaS products, even great ones like Salesforce.com, small companies tend to jump on top of any SaaS product that they think can help them progress. Large companies tend to be averse to any information that resides outside of their firewall, despite great studies about the security of the cloud like this one.

So what is driving the decisions at your company? Is it your age and your company size or are you realistically looking at all of the options that your company has?