[9oliYQjP]

I can't speak to your first-hand experience with them. But do you think they made this pivot because their contracts were not renewed? Or is it possible -- I'd speculate, probable -- that developing a business model around Tracker is a much more appealing prospect for them than software consultancy?

Software consultancy gets old quickly. You trade your steady paycheque being told what to do, for a not-so-steady paycheque being told what to do. Even at $15K per week, the revenue is not as scaleable as the potential revenue from charging for Tracker would be.

Again, I can't speak to your first-hand experience. But it struck me as sounding a bit mean spirited. I'm not sure if that was your intention. If they can churn out Tracker, which is pretty good, but are doing a mediocre job with some contracts, there's a correlation there. It doesn't mean they are necessarily the cause for the mediocrity. The cause might boil down to "fit" and this may be the reason why the contracts were not renewed.

EDIT: Actually, on further investigation (which I should have done before posting this), Pivotal Labs is a lot bigger of a consultancy than I thought. It's more than probable that only a small handful actually touch Tracker. I was always under the impression that their consultancy was a lot smaller, so they could ensure consistently high quality.

[pivotaldan]

The speculation here is certainly understandable. The reality, though, is that Pivotal's consulting business is growing stronger than ever - we're over 100 great Rails developers now, with offices in SF, NYC, Boulder, and Singapore, and we are completely booked. All of our business comes from word of mouth - mostly existing and past clients. Check out some of them here: http://pivotallabs.com/clients.

Many clients do come back to us, but we actually try hard so that they don't ever "have" to - by leaving them with a maintainable, tested codebase, and effective engineering practices like TDD/BDD, pairing, aggressive refactoring, etc. We even help hire and train their own developers.

We kept Tracker free for almost three years, and over 180,000 people have signed up for it so far. We use it on all our projects, and the widespread adoption has been a great calling card for our consulting business. The decision to begin charging for it was not an easy one, but the reason is simple - we want to make Tracker better, faster, and establishing a revenue model for Tracker will allow us to devote more resources to it, including a larger dev team, support staff, and operational/hardware capacity.

Our goals are not to transition from a consulting company to a product one, but to do both equally well, and it's hard to do that when one side of the business has to fund/support the other.