white shirts & blue jeans - business dilemma

[jeffroy]

In my vision, software world is clearly divided in 'white shirts' - those who sell - and 'blue jeans' those who produce. This division is both in geography as in any society. My interest is in geography: some sell (mostly in USA & Europe) and some produce (India, Russia, East Europe). Usually, there is a lot of cheap work force available so 'white shirts' can afford to pay much lower than a normal comission a fair partnership relationship would presume. Most even don't pay on comission but on fixed or per-project ammounts. I want to mention I don't speak about 5-10 pages sites of flash intros, I am talking about large scale projects - really big contracts. At least this is my experience while I was working in Romania, most of the companies I knew there were doing just that - had western partners and did not work on comission, worked on fixed ammounts.

My dilemma is weather this it what is going on in other parts of the world and what would be the business model the 'blue jeans' company would benefit more from a partnership with 'white shirts'.

[MissingArrow]

I think you simplified it a tad too much.

Even if you have a firm that is made up of "blue jeans" you still need "white shirts" to sell you to the other "white shirt" company.

What seems to work the most for "blue jean" companies I am familiar with is to hire a sales person (a white shirt).

I hope that answers your question...

dan