More reasons to love small businesses

From a software vendor's perspective:

• Small businesses typically don't make decisions by committee.
• Small businesses typically are delighted to let you work with the people who will ultimately use the software you write for them.
• Small businesses know that they don't have the luxury of maintaining a procurement department that wastes more money than it saves looking for ways to justify its continued existence when there's not so much money to spend.
• Small businesses understand that they're paying by the hour for legal services, so they try to avoid the extra friction--and sometimes ill-will--caused by contracts that waste more paper defining terms than they do specifying any quid pro quo significant enough to justify legal counsel.
• Small businesses will typically let you know in no uncertain terms when something doesn't work, because they can't afford to shelve your solution and start over.
• Small businesses seem to be more comfortable doing business with other small businesses because (IMO) they don't expect you to waste money pretending to be a big noise--they prefer the lower fees and the fact that someone they know takes their calls.
• Small businesses often cannot afford to spend money on things that don't matter. This simplifies things more than I can express.
  

In short, small businesses live in the Real World. When you write software for them, they're happy that it does what they expected it to do. That's incentive enough to give them a something extra, something that will delight. Contrast that with working with a mega-corporation that can usually be counted on to waste the time you could be coding in meetings convened to give one or more Somebodies the impression that they were a part of the process. Or the time wasted in explaining to the right hand what the left was responsible for telling it. Or any number of grating nuisances that come from working with any monolithic and inflexible organization.

In the end, it doesn't matter how well you get along with "your" team on the client side. If you're doing anything that could be construed as useful, you can count on someone with more rank than clue to step in to "supervise." I'm sure that any number of software products aren't viable outside the Fortune 1000 country club. But after spending an hour or so today wondering what planet in which alternate universe spawned the people who write contracts for mega-corporation Legal departments, I'm losing my ability to understand why anyone would want to venture outside the small business market.