I’m not much for following financial markets. To be honest I try to stay out of tune of mainstream media because of the skewed view it imposes on me. Clearly there’s some talk about downturns and tough times for having to sell anything, including software. So what do you do?

My 2 cents is who cares? You can’t control markets. You can’t control customer buying decisions. I have a number of friends who are real estate agents. Are they stressed about the downturn in their market? No, they’re excited. They’re excited because they know they’re great at what they do. Look at the Toronto real estate market. Literally anyone could sell homes in that market the past 10 years. It took no skills and that drove the great agents mad. Their industry quickly filled with losers and pretenders. It takes a great agent to sell homes in a down market and those agents are excited about shaking out the fluff.

Don’t equate a down market to a non-existent market. Companies will continue to buy software. They may possibly buy less and you can bet they will pay more attention to what they’re buying. If you’re a strong player then that’s great news for you. You no longer have to compete with losers and pretenders as they will fail in a tighter market. So focus on you, your offering, your team, work your ass off and be great.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.