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Managing Your Company To Death
puppetman writes "This weeks I, Cringely is a frightening monologue on the plight of over-managed companies: VC's and professional managers who are looking to make a quick buck, even if it consigns the company to the rubbish heap. He praises companies like Oracle and Sun because the founder still runs the company, and is in touch with the core of the buisiness. He also makes an interesting aside about the founders of the Canadian company, Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry) and their personal contribution of $120 million for research into particle physics, to illustrate what happens when technical expertise and business success can lead to."
In the case of Oracle, I don't think Larry Ellison is still in touch with reality, never mind the core of the company!
===
You know that guy who stole your girlfriend away from you in the summer of '95? He's going to die.
the plight of undermanaged companies too! Its like anything - too much or too little of a thing leads to trouble...
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
This is just Dilbert wthout the jokes!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
He praises companies like Oracle and Sun because the founder still runs the company
The founder's presence is not a guarantee at all for the flourishing of a company - how many companies (ok, most of them are the usual derelict dotcoms) have evaporated into thin air in the last two years despite the founder still leading the company ?
And what about cases like CMGI, where it would've probably a better idea to get rid of the founder (David Wetherell) a long time ago ?
Just my $0.02...
You might want to know about their local exploits.
:-) At least they didn't rip off the city.
Too bad that by percentage, I'm told they only bought the R.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
to illustrate what happens when technical expertise and business success can lead to.
Perhaps I'm just too tired, but what did you just say? Lead to where exactly?
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Surely Borland isn't effectively dead. True, they no longer have the wide range of products they used to have, but they never made any money out of them. Remember C++ for OS/2? It almost killed Borland, no wonder they discontinued it. But Delphi is still a good product.
Lead to what? Incomplete sentences?
Money for nothing, pix for free
i am a management student - cringely has got a point. managers are only interested in their stock options / bonuses while they are still at the company. it's only *rational* that they think short term. in a speculative environment, shareholders may not even care about the longer term (look back at the last few years). the solution should be to make management's incentives longer term. e.g. stipulate contracts which delay the stock related payment of a manager for X years after he has left the company.
Money is, and always will be a bargaining point. If the benefits are not highllighted properly, research centers are borne to get their funds taken away, or worse, closed down.
"Do something man. Right now."
to illustrate what happens when technical expertise and business success can lead to.
Is that you, Butch "Rooster" McCrory?
>He praises companies like Oracle and Sun because >the founder still runs the company, and is in >touch with the core of the buisiness.
Anybody forgot to mention Microsoft?
He praises companies like Oracle and Sun because the founder still runs the company, and is in touch with the core of the buisiness.
What would this be? Screwing california out of it's hard earned money?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The company that I work for was recently bought out by a larger company.
Over the last year that I've been there, we have hired on a ton of new staff, made profits grow steadily, and we're just finishing the buyout of another company this month.
Both of the founders are in line, the CEO and the President of the company. Our parent company decided to keep them, which was the best decision that they could have done.
Many managers have difficulties to understand that there really exists people that are better than them in some areas. It makes them thinking that there own decisions are the best. A good manager can spot good employees and give them responsibility. To manage a company in detail is like fighting several wars at once with multiple fronts. You never get a complete picture down to detail level when you have limited time to read up on everything. Better let someone else do that and check in occasionally to see that it works.
What a big company needs is a clear direction and not what_pen_to_buy decicions.
HTTP/1.1 400
I work for a major Dutch cable company, in the tech support department. About two years ago, we had about 10,000 customers, built up over a year or two, and were therefore relatively small. Service was fairly good (except for a bad choice in cable modem systems), and improving.
Then the mother company, French, decided that they wanted to sell us. So, they set a goal for 100,000 customers by the end of the year. That's a lot of growth. Somewhere down the line, they even hired to consulting managers (*expensive*!) to guide tech support and the like.
The result is obviously guessed: The company is now nearly bankrupt, though a buyer has been found ("Look! Over 100,000 customers!"), and the layoffs have begun to keep the company afloat long enough for fresh capital.
They destroyed a perfectly functioning company that could have handled quite a bit of painless expansion, simply to increase its value for a sale. Can someone explain to me why this sort of thing would be good for the economy?
We need a new golden age of geeks. Linux and open source aren't enough. We need to have more impact on the society around us, and that can only come through political activity.
Your vote counts. Your voice can be heard. You just need to speak up.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I believe this becomes a problem for companies that have gone to the stock market. When a young company is started, it is managed by people who believe in its vision and fortunately, they own all stocks.
When more money is needed, the stock market is used to to so, but as a result other people own the shares of the company and expect too much from it: they think that the company can still grow as much as it did during itsstartup. When it fails to do so, they blame the management (of course) and replace it in order to make as much profit as possible and in a short time frame.
Sometimes I have the feeling that the modern American workplace has regressed into a sort of feudal structure, where management is the aristocracy. The MBA is like a patent of nobility, and once you've got it, you're of the blood, and must never again really worry about your existence. If you toady to higher ranking nobility, you'll get a fief (management job) of your own complete with productive serfs (programmers, etc). If your fief is big enough, you can parcel out sub fiefs (lower tier management) to lower nobles (your business school/ frat chums) and be a liege lord.
And just like back in the day during feuds and other conflicts nobles who lost were almost always treated well by the victors and often were offered chances to switch allegience, today you can easily climb into a good job even if your company tanks (lacking a distinct skill set, managers are fungible; just look at the utterly disparate types of businesses that many CEOs have managed in their careers) and if that fails, there's always the golden parachute.
Back in the day, there were rarely serious consequences to the behavior of nobility as long as it didn't involve treachery towards those above you, and today this seems to be so with our manager class, at least as far as business decisions go. Being noble was enough.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
Yes, people will mod me down, reply that I'm an idiot but the fact is still that people who actually know how to make business is vital to any company!
Take a look at the last couple of years pathetic business-models and how many technology companies have been run.
A couple of examples:
* We are going to expand. No matter if we have customers or not, we are going to expand just for the . DON'T EXPAND JUST BECAUSE ITS FUN!
* We are going to spend thousands of man hours (=gigantic cost) and then give our products away for free. Dot-coms and open source development companies are examples of this. FREE DO NOT PAY THE BILLS!
* We are going to give away this huge product and
sell this tiny thing thats optional. If you do this you have just teached your customers that a huge product doesn't cost anything, it doesn't make any sense to pay for a tiny part then. This is how peoples minds work. Any business-oriented person knows this but tech-people apperently does not.
* We are going to sell product X or service Y for this cheap stuff. Why do you think people pay so much for support for enterprise server software or enterprise databases? Because the products are expensive, that makes it possible to charge much for support or third-party software or other third-party products. When the products becomes cheap no one pays as much anymore, it indicate low value. You wouldn't pay $5000 for a car stereo in you fiat, right? Any business or sale-oriented person knows this but most tech-people don't.
It's more a matter of goals; If a company is aimed to increase the stock value instead of make products it's anyway doomed in to the long run.
The main difference berween M$ and Enron was that M$ did illegal pratices to sell more products while Enron did illegal pratices to cover the fact that selling nothing at all wasn't a great strategy to raise cash.
VC's and professional managers who are looking to make a quick buck, even if it consigns the company to the rubbish heap.
A big cause of this must be preverse incentives. If the new CEO gets lots of stock/options, the overriding incentive is to pump-and-dump the company, which is not a good plan for the long term. Responsibility for preverse CEO incentives lies with the Board.
People will mod me down, reply that I'm an idiot but the fact is still that people who actually know how to make business and sell services and products are vital to any company!
Take a look at the last couple of years pathetic business-models and how many technology companies have been run and have tried to sell stuff.
A couple of examples:
* We are going to expand. No matter if we have customers or not, we are going to expand. DON'T EXPAND JUST BECAUSE ITS FUN! Expandations should in most cases be organic, in small companies it should more or less ALWAYS be organic.
* We are going to spend thousands of man hours (=gigantic cost) and then give our products away for free. Dot-coms and open source development companies are examples of this. FREE DO NOT PAY THE BILLS! Nothing will ever change this fact. And just forget about charging in a later stage. Have you got customers used to the idea of not paying it's extremely hard to change that later.
* We are going to give away this huge product and
sell this tiny thing thats optional. If you do this you have just teached your customers that a huge product doesn't cost anything, and then it doesn't make any sense to pay for a tiny part. This is how peoples minds work. Any business-oriented person knows this but tech-people apperently does not.
* We are going to sell product X or service Y for this cheap stuff. Why do you think people pay so much for support for enterprise server software or enterprise databases? Because the products are expensive, that makes it possible to charge much for support or other third-party products. When the products becomes cheap no one pays as much anymore, it indicate low value. You wouldn't pay $5000 for a car stereo in you fiat, right? Any business or sale-oriented person knows this but most tech-people don't.
Take Apple. Love or hate Steve Jobs, Apple tends to work as a company from the consumor point of view because everything has been thought of. From the Australian stone floors in the bathroom of Apple Retail Stores, to the brand dress on boxes and the look of OS X... everything works together.*
(*Note: Not to say that it all works perfectly, but for the most part, it does work)
Compare Apple to one of those companies that are ran by comitte. I would say Direct TV is a great example. They are in the middle of an access card swap and my DirectTV/TiVo has a banner on the screen telling me to 'Replace your access card now.' Only one problem, I haven't received it in the mail yet, and I can't clear the banner off the screen without replacing the access card.
I called customer service and was told that my card was mailed out on Oct 11, but they couldn't clear the banner off my screen at all. This, to me, is a symptom of a company being run by a bunch of suit wearing monkies-
Security Manager - "How are we going to make sure our moronic customers don't just throw the new access cards away?"
UI Manager - "Simple, we just annoy them with a big message across all their TV screens that won't go away until they replace the card."
Security Manager - "Great! But what if they don't have the card yet?"
UI Manager - "Fuck Em! It'll show up SOMEDAY."
As such, I have called customer support every hour, on the hour and asked them to clear the screen.
"But most just felt an increasing ache as their company slowly changed into something they no longer liked."
This is why I left Intel. Plain and simple. When I suddenly became a mini-manager [not by choice, I assure you] and still had 3 managers immediately above me (who had, in turn, 4 or 5 more above them) I knew it was time to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and get the fuck out. I took a nice separation package and hauled ass without looking back.
Of course... now I've said it out loud and the Blue Men will come hunt me down or something...
- I am made of meat.
Why do "the analysts" feel it's imperative and so ungoldy urgent that a company like Intel must grow ALL THE TIME?
SCENARIO: Me alone in a room with a freaking-out analyst.
A:"Oh no! They only made $6.2 billion this quarter! That's no more than thet made last quarter! ZERO GROWTH!"
M:"Yes, but they sold a shitload of parts. They make parts. They sold a shitload. That's good. They sold a shitload the quarter before that. See a trend?"
A:"Zero growth!!! De-Value them! Down-rate the stock!"
M: *punches analyst in the groin*
This is my dream. Then I force him to buy all my worthless stock.
- I am made of meat.
...But I'm not going to hold my breath...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Anyone remember Metricom, and their Ricochet network? You knew they were gonna go under when they stopped selling service direct, and started selling through expensive retailers like Worldcom...
Not to mention other brain-dead tactics like disabling peer-to-peer connectivity between modems, forcing subscribers to migrate to more expensive 128kbps service, and selling modems at a loss in order to induce people to sign up.
That's one company that so obviously was run into the ground by management bozos. Superior product with manageable growth, replaced by unmanageable spending and excessive debt. Serves the bastards right when they passed up the inital bankruptcy bid of 20mil, and ended up getting bought out for only 8mil!
The sad thing is every corporate exec that worked for them is probably employed at some hapless company right now. There should be a blacklist of suits circulated around the geek community, so you know to bail when one of these idiots signs on to your company...
To be fair to managers, not all of them are complete gits. To for a technology company to suceed it is not enaugh for it to be run by a 24 carat geek with a high as it gets IQ and who loves to hakck code etc... I have seen a number of companies end up living of 2-3 projects, often all of these projects are financed by the same sposor and when that sponsor needs to downsize... Well what you get then is what the Germans are getting now, as Siemens, BMW, MBB and others cancel projects and we see 45000 bankrupcys happen in one year, which in Germany is a post WWII record. What is really needed is a bunch of geeks, marketing people and managers working together. Then and only then will a company do well. If you take a look at alot of those companies he cites as examples of companies who have not been managed to death it is either because their leadersip is well balaced in these three departments or because they happen to have a leader who has a flair for more than just the tecchnical side but also marketing and management.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Why? Stock ownership on the stock market more closely resembles the activity of a sports betting syndicate than actually owning a company; most stock trading is not driven by an individual interested in a company but institutions interested in maximising return.
The people who actually care about companies are referred to as stakeholders these days - non-C*O level employees, customers, and the communities in which those companies do business. They all have an interest in the long term value of the company (much as sports fans care about thier favourite teams and the quality of the game). Stockholders don't.
The two problems with executives incentives are these:
1/ Anyone smart/devious/whatever enough to end up the CEO of a company like Tyco will likely understand very well how to screw the company (and owners, and stakeholders) for all they're worth. If you've hired someone who has a good understanding of the complexities of modern multinaitonal businesses and who is ruthless enough to, eg, fire thousands of people on your behalf, why would you assume that they won't look after number one? It's the rational thing to do.
2/ GTHe stockholder problem I alluded to above. Funds managers and VCs don't actually give a fuck if the company succeeds, nor do many investors. They care about maximising return, and if that means raping the company into oblivion, screwing staff, communities, and customers, they won't care - because they'll just shift their money elsewhere to someone who is doing it on their behalf.
Markets have become so efficient and rational in the short term, they're incapable of protecting the long term. And investors have gotten very good at socialising risks (bankruptcy, layoffs, etc) and keeping profits.
I'm not sure how you come off considering Apple to be one of the best off companies. Yes, they have managed to be successful and stay in bussiness thus far, though their marketshare number have shrunk as of late. However, they don't even compare to the real giants.
If you want to stay in the tech industry, Microsoft and IBM are two great examples. Both much, MUCH larger than Apple and neither run by a fanatical leader. Bill Gates did exert a great deal of control over MS, however it was still not his singular drive running the company, just his overall vision. IBM, well they just defince the faceless corperation. I bet even most geeks can't name their CEO.
It's much the same in other industries. Take General Electric. They are, by most measures, the biggest company in the world. They do everything from aircraft engines to lightbulbs to health insurance (really, they are my provider). They have so many divisions it would be impossable for a single person to control them entirely, even if they wanted to.
I think many Mac fans are so personally facinated with Mac products that they loose sight of the overall picture. Apple is certianly a successful company, of that there is no debate, but they are not a giant, and probably never will be.
Apple is to the computer industry somewhat like Mackie is to the audio industry. They both make quality products, and make money doing it. They both have a storng following. However, ultimately, both are small time players.
I've felt modern capitalism is moving to resemble fuedalism for a while; moreover, what we're seeing now, especially in the States, is the moral problem of capitalism Adam Smith warned about.
I heard a good quote a while back: "Technology is dominated by those who manage what they don't understand". If someone from a management or business background comes into a tech company, all they'll be looking at is the bottom line, not what really gets them to the bottom line. It may be naive, but in my view the main role of management should be to support the people on the chalk face who actually produce whatever it is the company sells. Shareholders may come and go, but without a productive workforce, the only way is down. It seems these days the best way to bump up the share price by a few cents is not to announce a new product, but to announce layoffs. You'll probably see the stock drop back to what it was again in a few weeks (or days), but your staff are gone for good, and if you've ass-rammed them just to give the investors proof that you're "doing something" about the stock price, then they ain't coming back. "Remember, layoffs are for life, not just for NASDAQ". Where I work (and I suppose in most companies), they have a stock options scheme we call the "golden handcuffs", where you get given X amount of shares for doing well, but you can't divest them for Y no. of years. If all packages were like this, then you'd get a lot less "locust manager" behaviour i.e. come in, gut the company in order to artificially inflate the stock price so joe shareholder is happy for a few days, and get out with a nice big wad in the back pocket before things hit the wall. If the first thing a new manager was told was "Well, if you're succesful we'll give you lots of shares, but you can't divest any of them for 5 years", then you'd see a lot less Bernie Ebbers around.
I think there should be some sort of punishment for company execs that put to much into short term growth and not enough into long term growth. Obviously they need to keep enough money coming in to pay everyone and allow modest growth but it's bad for the company, employees, and economy when they quickly inflate their own wallets and then jump ship before the company pops and sinks.
A great deal of our current economic situation was caused by tech companies doing just this. The worst cases are obviously where company execs sell out leaving all other stock holders and employees holding the bag but it really isn't much better falsely inflating these companies. People are still buying tech. Electronics and other techie gizmos are still hot selling items. Companies are still making a profit from them. There is no real reason for the tech market not to be booming. It's just dead because of the few individuals that were greedy and shortsighted.
Also I think the concept of day trading is partly to blame. People don't buy stock for long term value. They buy it, try to make a few quick bucks, and sell it again. They don't care where that company will be in five years. They don't care where the world will be in ten years. It's no better than a get rich quick scheme.
Research and technology drive society forward. They give us new abilities, raise the standard of living, and give people something new to buy. They may not pay out in an immediate obvious way but they are what fuels our economy and lifestyle and should be protected.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Pardon the tangential subject as we wander from over-managment to bad business models. Really, no amount of good management can fix a broken business model. Good management might rewrite a broken business plan and fix an ailing company, but so might bad management rewrite a perfectly function business plan. But back to the point.
Open source development frequently comes down to an issue of profit through service rather than the product itself. In the case of one kinda big company, they're spending some large money developing and integrating open source solutions to phase out some of their products. Sometimes it works better providing services rather than constantly maintaining one's own proprietary software, or at least it may become easier to maintain when your customers sometimes volunteer improvements.
The same give-away-the-product, sell-the-support system works for some smaller companies who sell to home users. Good tech support is certainly worth plenty, especially when even mature software can sometimes be confusing.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Normally I don't do this but this article by Cringely warrants an exception.
'phenomenae'. What a cretin.
Are you expected to trust the rest of the article after that?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I usually think Cringely does good research and has clear insights. This week, I believe he's got it wrong.
:-)
Companies do not exist to make traditions. Companies do not exist in order to secure basic technological research. Companies do not exist in order to provide decade long careers.
Companies exist because you can create more value by putting a number of people under one umbrella than by having everyone in the world make a freelance living. It's simple Adam Smithian division of labour, no more and no less.
It is always temptimg to decry 'short-term'policies. But the fact remains none of us has a long term crystal ball. Five year plans never happen. Short term thinking is absolutely rational.
I'm sure it's the case that many 'professional management' teams do a bad job. It may even be the case that they do a worse job than founders motivated by enthusiasm might have done. But there's no inherent caasal factor there. It may well be that Cringeley's unsubstantiated charge of cronyism creates worse teams than some more meritocratic proces might. But he does not demonstrate that.
Prodcutisng industries all work like Hollywood - one success pays for multiple failures. No-one really understands what will create success. All we are seeing is that in a tight economy people tolerate fewer failures before they become risk averse. That's natural, and rational. It'll swing back again.
And I am not an MBA
I mean take a look at apple
they have a founder
but dont really have a identity just a attitude
it nearly brought it to its knees because the management was dual throughout the company technical and business
job's is not a computer freak he hardly knows how mice work but yet appears to know and thats all that matters to the crowd
really the only companies that I admire are MIPS IBM Mitsubishi ICI and ARM
regards
John Jones
I disagree with his assertions that maximizing shareholder wealth at the expense of employee satisfaction is regarded as a good thing in business schools. It is obvious that Cringely has never attended a business school. I am working on an MBA and this is simply not the case. Employee satisfaction and well-being is consistently associated with success.
Yes, maximizing shareholder wealth should be a goal. Shareholders are the owners of the company. If they aren't satisfied with the direction of the business, then you've got problems. Your board and management team don't mean anything if the shareholders decide to dump them.
Cringely overestimates managerial influence on the companies that he mentions, but disregards other factors such as economic conditions and competition. Most of those companies simply could not compete with industry leaders.
Of course, I never take Cringely seriously...
Sometimes the company founder goes away, the company gets managed almost to oblivion and then the founder comes back (or some corporate take-over king) and kicks the mis-managers in the ass and turns the company around.
In either case (founder or take-over king) the company is saved from its own management by throwing them out.
I have found a use for lawyers and MBAs: Fertilizer.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
How did that happen? Several factors: first, the third-generation family owners preferred to kick back and party rather than concentrate on the business. Even during the 1970s, the signs were showing. For a long time, they produced a line of lightweight, high-quality bikes in their Chicago plant, along with their heavier, mass-produced cousins like the Varsity. However, the utterly failed to promote them, and they were easily mistaken for the low-end bikes.
Meanwhile, out in California, people were taking old heavyweight cruiser bikes and fitting them with derailleur gears, and the mountain bike was born. Schwinn basically ignored this trend until it was too late.
Also, labor strife reared its ugly head. The Chicago factory was unionized, and the United Auto Workers decided that Schwinn workers should be paid on the same scale as GM, Ford, and Chrysler workers. Management's response was to build a plant in Mississippi, which turned into a complete boondoggle. Production eventually was shifted over to the Far East.
Schwinn eventually went bankrupt, and the pieces were picked up by vulture capitalist Sam Zell. Eventually, the Zell-operated version of Schwinn went bankrupt again.
It was picked up by GT, went on for a few more years, and went Tango Uniform yet again.
Now it is in the hands of Pacific Cycle, a mass-marketer whose products grace the shelves of department stores.
The only member of the Schwinn family who is still in the bike business is Richard Schwinn, who owns Waterford, an ultra-high-end manufacturer located in Waterford, Wisconsin. The factory, once upon a time, built Schwinn's high-end Paramount line. What a pity he didn't have the resources to buy back the name.
Every time I see a "Schwinn" in Wal-Mart, it sets my teeth on edge.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
from the article: The founder/CEO/technical visionary meets with his board and finds him or herself out of a job. How could this happen?
If only that would happen at Microsoft!
(OK, if it's not _that_ funny, mod me down)
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
Wow, I'm pretty thankful I can't add any tales of Managers managing my company to death....
cuz that'd require something resembling management...
I suppose that it should be comforting to know that this a common occurrance, and that I am not the only entrepreneur to have been shagged by VC 'professional management', but it's not! After ten years of being modestly profitable ... oh, we had made some mistakes - like going public way too soon (or at all, in my opinion), but we were surving.
... we, as the founders knew that at a some point other folks would be needed to grow the company.
... what came next very much followed the narrative in Cringley's article. Fifteen months later, the new management had run the company into the ground and disappeared; the VC firm has taken possession of the intellectual property; and the original shareowners (many of them employees) were left with nothing! Now everytime I run into one of my former employees, I am struck with the guilt of having allowed this to happen to them.
... even, then I would seriously consider selling to the employees first.
However, we were missing the dot.com boom and the board decided that additional management and new financing were just what was needed to grow the company. Initially the idea seemed like it may be a good thing: it would raise additional financing, which would allow us to accelerate the development of our product
In hind-sight this turned out to be a bad move
Lessons learned: next time keep the 'professional managers' out until you are ready to detach and walk away
Natty
Maybe the rain Isn't really to blame. So I'll remove the cause, But not the symptom!
This happened to me. What I would recommend anybody in a similar situation is to read Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. The book is advice to Princes of small states in Italy in how they should keep control of their states. It was written 500 years ago - but equally applies to Software Start-ups. It is most famous for the quote the "The end justifies the means".
......... they keep no faith with men; and your downfall is deferred only so long as the attack is deferred; and in peace you are plundered by them, in war by your enemies."
Any venture capital company should read the chapter "On Troops and Mercenaries" - substitute - Mercenary for Hired Gun Management. Machiavelli say's "Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous" - further on he says "they [Mercenaries] are brave among friends [read the board and head-hunters]; among enemies they are cowards
Basically what Machiavelli goes on to say is that troops don't really fight for money, but for vision and belief in the Prince. If an employee does not believe that the CEO is in for the long haul why should he be?
I did OK money wise, but this did not stop me going into massive depression for about a year after I was replaced. It feels like somebody messing up your toys....
That isn't a sentence. I for one think Slashdot should post only sentences, particularly on the front page.
I've worked at DEC, IBM, and Lucent's Bell Labs and all three had the problem of promoting to management people who were either not skilled at dealing with people or who were less than technically competent.
Sometimes the companies would allow these folks to terrorize the staff with rants and threats. Often they judged these managers by how large their group or department was -- not by the work output and timeliness of project results.
Groups of folks would kiss up to them and they were rewarded with raises and promotions.
I thought working for a small startup would be better -- but I found the same problem with a computer start-up and a telecom one -- since the managers were all trained in the above big companies.
I've worked for one good manager in the last 12 years -- in 3 jobs in 3 companies including two of the above biggies. If you get a good manager try to hang on tight...Most of them are more even clueless than the HR staff.
I think I could run a company better by just running it like the budget was my checkbook.
I saw the contents of the Enron bankrupcy auction and it sickened me. Piles of what looked like under-used computer equipment and aeron chair I bet the janitor had a laptop and docking station.
As far as basic research... there are few companies doing anything but product oriented work now. The days of Bell Labs doing a lot of serious research are long past. It's been less than spectacular for more than 5 years.
That was a byproduct of the regulated telecom industry and the profits it brought.
IBM has always done work with a serious connection to their current and future businesses.
--BillAll of these business models can be traced to having way more venture capital than you know what to do with. I worked for many years for a company that was privately owned. It was extremely well managed, because the owners weren't playing with someone else's money.
In comes some business yahoos (pardon the term) who don't know squat but have lots of financial backing. They conglomerate a bunch of profitable companies and manage to lose a ton of money... of course, not *their* money. Their only goal is to IPO, cash out, and leave the employees and customers holding the bag.
Welcome to "the company I work for.com" But more mismanaged than over managed!
who can lead a business from inception to large scale success. It takes different talents and skills. Those adept at starting companies either can't or don't like the routine administration of business. They like to be on the edge, doing it all themselves. Those that can successfully manage a large company aren't suited for start-ups. They can't tolerate the risk and ambiguity of a new business.
No mystery there.
What a hoot! Scott McNealy has defined himself by being anti-microsoft instead of pro Unix/Solaris. Just google the guy. He never talks about Solaris, only about how bad Microsoft is.
Maybe if Sun brought some geeks to the front office, they could bring back some excitement to the Solaris community. Who knows?! Dare I suggest that Sun could even win a benchmark or even make a sale ???
I think the article is on target even if his examples aren't. Cisco is a classic example of the original visionaries being pushed out.
*Disclaimer - I have been unemployed for 6 months as a result of my company being bought and subsequently being laid off.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
The one person that really comes to mind here is Steve Jobs. He got forced out in a board room coup and the company went to hell in a hand basket.
Now he's back at Apple and things look golden again.
Perhaps the cure for some of these "sick" companies is to get the founder back to inject some of the old passion back into the company?
Like him or loath him, Steve Jobs has passion - and that shows in the products. Probably more than anyone else. (I still have my old NeXT boxes)
This attitude is at the heart of the problem. Shareholders do not "own" a company in any useful moral sense. They buy stock because they want the stock to do well, not because they give a toss how well the company does.
You should invest in a company because you believe in what it is doing. If things go wrong and you lose money, guess what? You made an error of judgement. Tough. The idea that some twat in a pensions company can start telling me how to run my company just because he owns a shitload of my stock is ludicrous.
Having worked at Metricom at the time of the "management change", I watched as the core founders and technologists (many of whom were still in engineering, some of whom were management but continued to provide expertise/experience) who developed the Ricochet get pushed out by the fast ripple of change brought on by Vulcan Ventures' appointments. I followed suit, watching the sh*t roll downhill and hoping to dodge it (which I did, successfully...although I left before the big MCI stock jump, wah. No options exercising for me!)
Then again, can't be as bad as a company I later worked for -- 22 VP's ran a ~100 person company (and multiple directors had no employees they directed.)
There are certainly examples of successful companies that ousted their founders (Cisco being probably one of the biggest successes.) The question is, what would Cisco have been if the founders were kept?
Generally, engineers (and scientists) make poor managers, but engineers and scientists can make senior researchers/architects/designers alongside the MBA's to make sure the books add up and the sales force brings in business. Most VC's, as the author pointed out, are looking for quick profit and bumping off the people with the $.25/share options and seniority is a quick way to make it.
Just like Lockheed too! Lockheed is in the same type of management downfall as all the other big boys. Little research, mostly production. Should be interesting to see how they make new designs in the future without engineers. Maybe they will have a similar claim to fame like the original stealth fighter made soley by electrical engineers, maybe they will have a new design made soley by management! He he :)
I really like Cringley's article. That said there's something important that was left out:
The wealth of a business owner does not come from income but from the value of his or her stake in the business. Ultimately this wealth is "paper" wealth untill the company is sold.
That means if it is best for owners to sell, they'll "package" the company for sale (this often involves actually reducing the value of the company to a level that someone will buy it). What's more, a lot of the actions that appear shortsighted are acutally long term maneuvers to sell out. Closing down R&D to make your books look attractive is one way to do this. With businesses, "let the buyer beware" is the rule, not the exception.
One condition that universally sucks is when something happens that makes it appear that the owners of a company's wealth is at risk. Then owners pressure managers to make shortsighted decisions to protect their wealth and often attempt to prematurely sell the company. The results are often mass layoffs and the buyer gets a firm that is cancerous and consumes their company or personal wealth as well.
At present I own a company. I know my employees will not like it when I decide to sell it. I can't guarantee that they will all come out ahead, but I'll try my best. The reason I started this company was to build it up, and then sell it so that I and my fellow investors could get rich. My employees benefit by having great jobs and some, through ownership options, will be rewarded when the sale happens.
$G
-- $G
A Beowulf cluster of these! Oh wait, that's offtopic.
I do agree with your comments. That is the reality -- buying stocks is more like gambling than anything. Shareholders should believe in the companies they invest in, treat their investments as ownership, and seek to advance that company. Then maybe we'd have less people dumping their shares the moment the company posts a loss in a single quarter.
"Bill Gates did exert a great deal of control over MS, however it was still not his singular drive running the company, just his overall vision."
Using BG and vision in the same sentence should get you modded off the number line altogether.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Much of the management behaviors decried in Cringley's article are due to the way the Stock Market works today.
The original idea behind stock was as a way for the company to get money to grow. The stock buyer was counting on getting an annuity - the dividends of the stock. As a result, the upper bound on the current value of the stock was set by the interest rate and the dividends the company paid out - if the interest rate was 10%, and the stock paid $1 in dividends per year, then if the stock cost less than $10/share it was undervalued. If the stock cost more than $10/share, you would do better to invest your money in a bank.
Thus, stock holders were looking at the long term - what is the company doing to increase the dividends?
But then people noticed that if they could make a short-term change in the expected return on the stock, the current value would move. Thus, they began to change the short-term operations of the company, to change the estimated dividends (and thus the current price of the stock), then SELL and move on.
Thus stocks became trading cards, and the current era began. Buy into a company, manipulate the stock price, sell, repeat. (OK, PROFIT! there, I said it, you don't have to.)
Now, consider this - What if the capital gains tax worked like this:
If the gain is realized in less than 6 months, then the gain is taxed at 90%.
If the gain is realized in 6 months to 1 year, then the gain is taxed at 75%.
If the gain is realized in 1 year to 5 years, then the gain is taxed at 50%.
If the gain is realized in more than 5 years, then the gain is taxed at 0% (i.e. not taxed).
Now, consider these scenarios:
You buy into an IPO, sell when the stock peaks a month later, sell. You get nailed for 90%. Since that is the case, there would be MUCH less demand for the stock, and it wouldn't shoot up so much.
You buy into a company, manipulate the stock price by gutting it, and pop that golden parachute a year and a day later. You get nailed to the tune of 50%. You are STILL discouraged from these games.
You buy a house. Five years later, you move from Silly-con Valley to Wyoming, and from a $500,000 house to a $250,000 ranch. You pocket the $250,000, since it isn't taxed.
I was watching a show several years ago on PBS, wherein a representative of the Federal Reserve was debating a person who's position was "The Fed should just leave the damn interest rates alone and let the market correct itself." The Fed guy said "But we have all this information, and it would be wrong for us not to provide feedback to the system".
When he said "feedback to the system" I had an epiphany - I am an electrial engineer, control systems are something I've studied at length. Unlike an economist, engineers are trained in mathematical tools to examine systems for stability. One of the things that will make a system unstable is too much lag from stimulus to feedback response - it's called "phase margin". The economy has a very LARGE phase lag - making a change to interest rates today will not take effect tomorrow. Also, there is "gain margin" or frequency response - the higher the frequency response the faster the system will react, but too much will cause oscillation. Systems with a large phase lag need to have a very low bandwidth, or they will oscillate. What my proposed cap gains tax would do is reduce the bandwidth of the system by reducing the gain at high frequencies.
Now, you can apply a simple check to my proposal - who will it piss off? The Republicans won't like it, since it prevents the very sort of short-term market manipulation that makes money for fatcats. The Democrats won't like it, because it allows middle-class folks to make money long term (so they can retire without relying on the government for assistance).
And I assert that anything that pisses off both the Republicans and Democrats cannot be a bad thing.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Ibm adds some code at this point but in the long run they will not develop software that they give way. It makes sense for them to do that at this point but there is no chance in hell that they will continue to do that in any significant way.
Ibm is a service company, THAT is what they do. They will not develop software to give away for free a couple of years down the line from now. They will let others drive themselves bancrupt doing that.
Then we went public, lots of money burned, but the product didn't fly high, and the grey-haired managers showed up. The VCs & large institutional investors that now controlled the company brought in management to wring as much money out of the company as possible. Since we weren't a high flyer the large investors didn't care about keeping us alive anymore, they just wanted as much money as possible extracted from it.
By this point I had bailed, I didn't like the way things were going. As fate would have it, I jumped from the frying pan into the fire, but that's another story.
It survived for a few more years. Pieces of the company were spun off & sold off. The large investors had gotten a sweet deal on stock, but had to hold it for a several years. A few months after they could legally sell it I noticed the company's stock skyrocket -- then drop .... for 3 days it rachetted up on low volume then dropped on high volume. Several times the outstanding share volume changed hands over those few days.
By the end of that year the company was dissolved
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
of the machine. As I type this on one of the finest computers I've ever owned (Ti), using one of the most beautiful operating systems I've ever used (though it's still a bit slow), I do feel like I'm benefiting from the result of one man's dream. I have a minor (biz) partner in my company who, on a daily basis, rails about the 'dictator' Jobs and how he 'forces' his descisions on us (ex. the forced march to OS X), while I just see Jobs' iron hand/will as an excellent (Cringley) example of a vision brought to life, and by God I love to type and program on it. Could be that charismatically /founder/vision lead companies are ultimately doomed. How well will Gates pass the torch to the Monkey? Will Jobs passion pass on? Who cares, let's benefit now and enjoy the fruit.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
It's those suits and ties them 'management' folk are wearing. Nearly strangle them, those ties do. Cuts the blood supply to their brains. No wonder they act the way they do.
--frank[at]unternet.org
I worked for a small-ish (less than 100 employees when I joined) that was run out of a warehouse. It was 12 years old when I joined. I worked there for three years. In that time, two of the original three owners (one having succumbed to heart disease) sold the company to a much larger company. All the while taking care of their employees. Not so much through bagels and stock options, but by paying a competitive salary, and letting the do their job. The only reason I left was location. The original designers of the core package are still there (think old men with long beards).
That was a well run company.
Yes, you are absolutely correct, I managed to forget that one.
Dude, you've got it all wrong. In feudalism there were mutual obligations between lords and serfs.
In corporations, obligations only go one way: up (aside from some salary crumbs thrown downward). There is no more company loyalty because corporations destroyed it by indiscriminate layoffs for decades to increase their stock price.
The management structure is authoritarian at best and totalitarian at worst.
Quiz question: Can a democratic society survive when the majority of its citizens spend the majority of their time being controlled by totalitarian economic regimes?
gamblers with a hot tip. The stock market seems like a big casino populated by Larson cows.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I've been in company after company where the founder has a great idea, gets the company started, then can't manage or build the company for beans. They all wound up in the scrapheap.
A sign of a good company is one where the founder(s) realize they can't do any more good for the company and step down in favor of someone with real business sense who can grow the company from there. A better sign is when the founder(s) stay either on the board or as CTO/corporate visionary.
Sun and Oracle's success are probably flukes. Two success stories does not prove anything. Not when I have 4 stories that prove otherwise.
Since most MBAs lack domain expertise and since the much of the behaviour taught in business school is geared towards stripping a company of assets, I'd have to guess that you're better off without them.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
IBM is most definitely not phasing out AIX. I read that in Network World or one of those other trade magazines, in an article about how AIX has this new feature where users can "split" the server into multiple parts. I don't remember the details on the technology, but I think that IBM is likely backing Linux in case Linux gets some sort of feature that would make a good addition to AIX.
Coca-Cola is actually taught as a company that was overly managed. When Ivester took over in 98 or 99 he micromanaged it to the point of negative equity income from bottlers. Before he took over, everyone in the world thought he would be the best guy for the job when the time came. Then it turned out he wasn't and he resigned on his own citing his inability to effectively manage the company.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
His point is that due to short term thinking, companies do not / no longer exist, period. It's not about who does the best job, cronyisms or meritocracies, but what the job is. If you agree that regardless of what a company is supposed to deliver (value ? paychecks ? etc), it should first of all continue to exist, then he is right that management has been wrong lately in prioritizing personal profit over company lifespan.
One of the essential problems is that, by law the management are required to maximise shareholder's value. There are lots of things that management can do that will increase shareholder's value (i.e. the value of the stock) in the short-term but may be detrimental over the long-term. Acquiring other companies is a typical action. Alternatively they might try to boost profit in the short-term by slashing staff or research budgets and then angling for a buy-out by a big multinational. All these things are easily defensible. The stock goes up, the shareholder's see their "value" increase and everyone is happy.
On the other hand we have long-term actions such as basic research that are far harder to justify to shareholders used to the instant returns of recent years.
If the stock market has less speculators we'd probably see less of the fast money which in term might lead to shareholder's valuing long term actions more. However there will always be people who attempt to make short-term returns, and while this is the case there will always be the urge to cash-in as soon as possible.
What about Starbucks? Howard Shultz brought in management (underneath and around him) to help build Starbucks -- he said in his book he just looked at companies 2x his size and found management from there. So, in their case it worked. Or is Starbucks still committed to it's core goal or has it changed?
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Your probally thinking of having different LPARs on the same machine. The RS/6000 (p-series, whatever) do that now.
you have multiple virtual servers running on the same machines. The technology has been in mainframes and as/400 machines forever.
( sun has machines that can do this too, I think )
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
As I read the article, I couldn't believe he wasn't talking about WorldCom. Every point he made rung oddly familiar to me & my co-workers.
Through the application of same principles Cringely decries, a solid company has become rotten and sucked dry by the vampires of (un)professional managment.
Simple greed extended to a grandiose scale.
Granted, there are plenty of examples of companies which went to pot because the founders were replaced by management-types. There are also plenty of examples of companies that made it because the founders were replaced by management-types.
It is obvious that you can't run a technology company if you don't understand technology, just as you cannot run Walmart if you don't have a clue what a department store is.
(Disclosure, I am an MBA.)
I have been providing services to high-tech companies for a decade, and my business has outlived those of most of my clients, and from my experience, the #1 failing point of companies is developing technology that is really cool but nobody wants, or developing technology that is really useful and not knowing how to make it into a real product. I can't tell you the number of companies I've worked for who have either never heard of a version freeze, or who freeze a version every month only to defrost it a day later.
Case in point, a good friend called me to ask me in what cases you should translate the user manuals to a different language, for example Portugese. He works for a small hw developer with real international sales. I said "well, you know how much you sell in Brazil, and your salespeople tell you how much more they might sell if people could actually use the product, and you can figure the cost yourself" (this is a system that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; read, even one extra sale would justify the cost). I continued "You know, just like you figure out whether to add a feature to the product -- you figure out how much it costs to develop the feature, and how many extra sales it will make you over the competition, and then you know if it is worth it, right??" and he was like, "Uh, well, that is a different way of thinking about it. We kind of have a meeting and discuss what to put in the product and usually we are right." Yeah, but it turns out that they don't document the new feature and nobody uses it unless they call the help desk. Etc., etc. This is a company that has been in business 15 years and has had sales for more than 10 of those years and they just went through a first round of layoffs. The obvious only reason they are laying people off is because of poor management by the founders. They should be profitable by now but they are still living off of venture capital.
You talk about the dotcom boom as if it were some kind of freak accident, but it wasn't. The eager engineers who founded all these companies really truly believed that their ideas and products had added value. And it wasn't only dotcoms -- look at all the telecom and wireless stuff. The dotcom bust was what happens when all those tecchies working out of their garages get a hold of real money. Now they are back working out of their garages, and 1% of them will emerge with something that makes money. Why 1%? Because that is the percentage of leaders out there who can be geeks and managers and marketeers, or who have the common sense to get someone to fill the gaps they don't do themselves. If you are the kind of founder who can't give real power to people who make up for your shortcomings, your company will go belly-up even quicker than the companies with managers who don't understand technology but can at least doctor the numbers.
The Ars Digita story is a classic example of what Cringely is talking about- a company run into the ground by "professional" managers brought in by the VCs. Here's the story, as told by one of the company's founders:
http://eveander.com/arsdigita-history
Even though it's "just one side of the story," the consensus is that it's pretty close to what really happened.
In the end, the VCs cut a deal with Redhat, who hired a few of Ars' staff to make it look like the company was successfully sold. Fortunately, Ars' great products live on as open source software, OpenACS, and Redhat's CCM. Though Ars' incompetent management pushed CCM as the next, great version of their software, it was never more than vaporware. Redhat has continued to develop it, but it's still not finished.
GOVERNOR: Holy underware! Sheriff murdered! Innocent women and children blown to bits! We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs, gentlemen. We must do something about this, immediately, immediately, immediately!
ALL: Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph!
GOVERNOR: I didn't get a 'harrumph' out of that guy!
HEDLEY LAMARR: Give the governor harrumph!
REPORTER: Harrumph!
GOVERNOR: You watch your ass.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
You keep saying "nuclear reactors" as if it's something evil...grouping them in with "guns" and "WMD". What's wrong with nuclear reactors? (And where do you think our power is going to come from in the future? Not coal, oil, or gas...what then? WIND? LOL!!)
Did you get that memo? We're putting the new cover sheets on all the TPS reports now.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Have you looked at the BMW logo? Its a propeller - get it? It took two world wars to get this company to focus on making great cars instead of aircraft engines and rockets. This company was banned from production due to war-time activities by international treaties - twice.
Apple treats its customers well? Three words - Apple Two Forever.
I'm a Gen-X Slacker, but I forgot I was one for almost 6 years. I worked my ass off for this company or that, trusting their management until I got my ass canned, when I'd get another gig paying twice as much. Well, last year the gigs ran out. If you're a Unix admin, you better damn well have at least a Masters in a technology field, 'cuz nobody's gonna look twice at you otherwise. Recruiters tell me there are 150-200 resumes submitted for every open position, and everyday a new tech company folds, or goes through a round of layoffs. While I'm in the top 10% based on my skillset and experience that means there's 15 to 20 people who are in line ahead of me. Some schmoe who spent the last six years figuring out Tetris was N-P for a sheepskin is gonna get the nod because all I ever did was flunk out of art school.
/., and drinking. So! Cram a little code, email the hell out of reviewers and tech news blogs, set up a website with credit card ordering information, et voila! Software company. There's probably an open source way to scam money from people with big iron and deep pockets, but I'm too lazy to think of it. Go think of it yourself.
In short, I trusted that someone knew what they were doing in the big corner office, and now I'm fucked. And it's all my own damn fault, because I forgot the work ethics that brought me into computers and technology in the first place. Time for some of that olde timey religion:
1) SLACK! The world does owe you a living.
Screw 80+ hour workweeks for fat checks. I want 10 hour workweeks for fat checks, and a reasonable assumption that the fat checks will keep rolling in with minimal effort. I don't mind hellacious effort up front... being a lazy sysadmin, I know ten hours of scripting and testing can lead to a hundred hours or more of prime goof-off time. (Or, as the case was, time to write more scripts and to string more cable for my corporate overlords.)
So, by putting in a lot of work that's actually just fucking around with the computer up front, I can spend more time reading comics, posting trolls to
2) If it's worth doing, it's worth DIY.
The suit-wearing weasels sold me out. I'll never trust another. "Professional Management" means "porfessional backstabber." Screw 'em. I will learn the fundamentals of business management from one of the many excellent books at my local library, used book store or web bookseller.
I will learn how to market what I make, and how to balance the books. I will learn how to grow a company. I will never hire employees, but I will pay co-conspirators, and I will figure out a way to make this legal. I will figure out how to run a health insurance/HMO co-op with local small businesses. I will do all this with the meager funds from my teensy, just-above-minimum-wage non-computer job, and I will make any interested Venture Capitalists drink a bottle of robitussin, and I will laugh at them as they hallucnate and tell them to get the hell out. MY company, damnit!
Because if it's worth doing, it's worth doing my own damn self.
But first! I will learn Java and low-level C programming, for the things I am now interested in require that knowlege. I'll fake the rest as I need to. In a year, I'll come back to let you know how well I've succeeded. (I can't fail, as I'm already at baseline failure state right now. Any change is an improvement.)
Slack!
SoupIsGood Food
... down in the bowels of slashdot
Just like a little Troll.
One of the issues that neither Cringley nor most of the Slashdot commenters got into with respect to VCs is that (i) their willingness to invest in a company is predicated on the company shifting into a high-growth mode and (ii) in turn, a company's interest in accepting venture capital is often to finance a ramp-up of the scope of their business. This often results in a change in the nature of the business (think of a small web consulting business circa '98 that is planning on turning its internally developed tools into a shrink-wrapped product) that (i) may legitimately require different managerial skills than those of the pre-funding company and (ii) is inherently risky. Additionally, VCs are in the business of making numerous low-probability/high-return bets. If there is a 1 in 10 chance that an investment will return a 20-fold return, it is a good bet for a VC -- and since a VC is able to diversify its risks by investing in 10 such companies, it is not devastated if one of them fails. Employees, however, are unable to diversify their risks and so may not be able to afford to bet their entire livelihood on a long-shot bet even if it has a positive expected value, preferring instead to stay in a lower-risk lower-return mode. Of course, during the dot-com bubble, the assessment (by VCs, company founders (who chose to accept VC funding), employees, the public stock market) of the risks and returns of VC-funded companies was systematically skewed in a way that turned out to be wrong.
I never thought I would say this but, Cringly is exactly right. This is what happened to the company I used to work for. We were a profitable software company with an open sourced product and many big legacy customers that depended upon us. After the dotcom crash we were still doing well and decided to take some venture capital to speed up growth. Three months later our CEO was out and a new one was hired. One month after that 1/4 of our management was laid off and dozens of new managers brought in. As soon as we had to carry a huge load of management we were no longer profitable, and have never been since. Rounds of layoffs followed, but they were always engineers who were laid off, never the CEO's cronies. I give the company a year before it dies and the assets are sold off. And this is a company with enough customers that our head of sales once told me we could support all of the company off of our legacy sales without ever selling another unit. I knew there was going to be trouble as soon as they started hiring marketing firms to write web pages for us and sending us ridiculous decree's from on high. We were a primarily NetBSD shop with some FreeBSD and Linux and they send us a memo saying we can't install any freeware on the workstations. The ignorance was astounding. Then they mandated that everyone had to start using Outlook, I mean most people did not even have a windows box available. They killed off all our partnerships where we got paid for every unit our customers sold and made everything a one shot payment with the gaurantee that we would give them support for the next to years and then, I kid you not, hired an ex-marine as the head of support. It was like dilbert come to life all around me. Oh well, I expect to see many of my old co-workers again in the next startup, but I must say, given the inefficiency of this process, I'm not at all surprised by the economic slump. This sort of slash and burn management has made me a communist. I used to think that competition would make for a healthy economy, now I realize it will be a return to feudalism. Greed is not a reason to live.
Harley Davidson is popular. But also, the original founders family members bought the company back from AMF and went public. Harley almost went the way of the dodo bird.
Also, this professionalism can be a bunch of crap. It is the cowboys that make things happens, not some MBA person. At work, I hear stuff on how "we are professionals" and "we should dress like it" (ie, no jeans, boots, etc.), behave on the outside such as refraining from certain activities like motorcycling or four wheeling since it is "unprofessional".
It was sad that the Dot Com's bombed because they led the way to unshackle the workplace from the unnecessary rules and regs. Morale boosters like relaxed dress code, telecommuting, flex time are being taken away one by one because of the economy being in the hole.
Let's poll the big American PC hardware makers as sort of a proof of Cringely's idea:
Well, IBM is run by the same group of identical white men who's real identity is irrelavent because they're all IBM men. Dell is still run by Michael Dell; same with Gateway and Ted Waitt. (And somehow, the commercials with Teddy talking to a cow that sounds suspicously like Maurice LeMarche taking over the world once again, probably is a prime example of founder-led companies doing silly, if not stupid things) And as we all know, Jobs the radical is driving Apple again. And, if you belive RXC, they're going to be around for awhile. Doesn't mean that they'll make good computers, but that they'll be around for a while.
But HP . . HP is now being run by Carly Fiorina, a professional manager- who's engaged in corporate warfare against HP's founding heirs . . in a battle to swallow Compaq that had dubious value except to keep Fiorina at the helm for another couple years; and now in the late stages of merger, both companies "redundant" capacities and divisions are being cut. Based on the premise of the article, HP's days are numbered. It may just take a few years for the behmoth to fall down.
I'm not fighting for anybody. I'm working to produce profit for your company. If I do so, I expect to be well paid for my services. If I don't, then why are you employing me? Time to part company.
In short, I am explicitly mercenery about how I work. I have no 'vision and belief in the Prince', I have vision in belief in my family. The better I do at work, the more they benefit. And better is measured purely in terms of how much money I can bring back home and how much time I can spend with them.
Vision and belief in the Prince. Pah. Who do you think the Prince has vision in, hmm? Himself. His successes accrue entirely to himself.
Cheers,
Ian
http://unequalprotection.com/
And we can take it back. The second link has amendments and ordinances for each U.S. state to bring the focus back to the community. Corporate existence is only allowed by our statutes and when they begin to degrade we need to dismantle them or reign in their control.
From the outside looking in, and being interviewed several times.. and refusing the job. Great Bridge, the ones who were promoting PostGres, seemed to be overmanaged. Too worried with getting management things done and not enough worry about contracts and getting contracts finished and started.
When you have 3 managers in on one interview, it seems to be overmanaged to me.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
That's true, but it's always nice to get into a field on the ground floor. See, one of the problems with professionalism (in the sense of a field's "going professional" and creating, for instance, professional managers) is that it raises the bar for entry, sometimes far too high.
For instance, I'm pretty sure it was a lot easier to get started in business 100 years or so ago -- you had a trade, and you did it, and "managing" wasn't something that you did as a career, it was something that you did to enable yourself to do all that other stuff you wanted to do (say, in Walt Disney's case, making cartoons).
Now, with so many fields professionalizing so rapidly, it's very hard to get into them at all unless you've got the appropriate professional credentials and/or (usually and) experience. (Oh, yeah, having friends in high places helps too.) Woe betide you if you don't have these things, because you will suddenly find yourself having to be twice as good as the existing competition to even get into the field, which can be tough when you're competing against people with 20 years' experience.
And sometimes having your field taken over by august sages and avocationists is not a good thing, either. To use an example I'm most familiar with, look at how dynamic, prolific and vibrant SF publishing was in the 1960s and 1970s. Now that it's been professionalized and commoditized so much, all that dynamism, exuberance (and not necessarily even youthful exuberance), and prolificness (prolixity? although not in the strictest literary sense) has gone out, and it's damn near impossible for a newcomer (of any age) to get published.
All fields need newcomers, beginners, and dabblers, so professionalism is not necessarily a good thing 100% of the time, especially since the trend lately in technology (and other fields) has been to refine, as opposed to innovate. Where are the innovators going to come from, if we don't encourage people to start doing something? You'd be surprised what novel approaches the "beginner mind" can come up with. Ask me about it sometime...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
*sigh*
Carthago delenda est!
Expandations! C'mon dubya, no need to post anonymously. We can tell who you are.
It was a small company run by the founder. He was the marketing department of the company by itself and was knowing his product. The VP succeed to convince the board to get rid of him because he spent money on development before a big contract was signed. The VP was now the new president
:-)
The year after the company on book was going good because the big contract was signed just after and money from previous contracts was entering. But the marketing department was now 5 people that were not knowing the products and that were not selling anything. There was no production because there was no new clients wich lower the expense and make the book looks even better. The development at his turn began to be cut because we were selling nothing. That company has turn from a company where the engineers and technicians were 75% of the people to a company where the administration and the marketing was occupying nearly 60% of the position
I learned just after I quit that the old VP receive a promotion to a bigger company because of the good job he has done
Um? JFS? High availability linux (linked by parent)? Don't those count as software they've already given away? And I'm sure there's several more examples which I'm not familiar with.
You're either not doing your research or you're just a troll.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
I launch a meme onto the 'net
and hope my point people will get....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Where are the owners, to supervise and discipline the managers they hired?
In those situations where the motivations of ownership, such as long term view, sustainable use of resources and return on investment, keep check on the motivations of management which tend to be maximal use of resources, imediate return on investment and short-term gain, there is prosperity.
When the task of management is all that is owned, such as with the "CEO for a day", the individual will focus on their own success regardless of its effect on the company. They are not an owner of the company, they have no ownership motivation toward the company.
Owners don't have to be good managers, they have to be good owners.
I suggest Ludwig von Mises "Human Action", which is online at http://www.mises.org/ as an excellent primer on how and why the division of labor works so well.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
No danger of Larry managing things to death.
http://www.oraclebmwracing.com
After a lot of years in the industry, switching back and forth between software and systems engineering, and technical and management positions, I have come to the following insight...
There are only a few ways of managing things correctly and a HUGE number of ways to fsck things up.
Un-educated, incompetent or greedy/immoral managers are essentually a long term death sentence on any effort.
The unfortunate thing is that since there are so many ways of screwing things up and so few ways of doing it right, very few of us get the opportunity to experience what it is like when management is doing their job well.
Not exactly heaven, but a long long way from the hell of "Death March."
My $0.02US.
LineGrunt
Cisco's annual report, while the stock dropped some 90% from its peak, noted with pride that the company had increased the number of VPs and upper management by a half this year. Ain't it great? Now we can manage the stock, er, company.
Like the other responder to this I too immediatly thought of Steve Jobs when I read Crigley's bit. I think you can really boil it down to "A company without a soul is doomed to fail."
I am interested in the Wall Street analysis that Apple perhaps has one of the worst board rooms in the industry, but then leadership by commity almost killed the company before. I see Apple as Steve's ship. He doesn't give you a good idea of where he's sailing, but you know that there will be some pretty cool ports of call along the way.
It's not like other companies that flounder around with too much market research or board room squabbles about where the ship should sail. It's almost like Steve puts down a 'this is really cool, we should do this' gauntlet and the board and the rest of the ship pull the oars to get there. If you don't like where Steve's going, well there's always Microsoft or OpenSource.
It would be refreshing is more companies were like this, rather than drafting in Apple's wake.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
You know there was a time, not so long ago, when companies actually shared their profit with their share-holders. They were called dividends, and they let you take the money from you share and re-invest it, or just live off of it.
The problem these days is that most investing is meant to pump the stock and dump it. If people could gt back to the concept on holding a stock for the dividends maybe real-world factors like profit/loss earnings and such would return to being factors in stock valuation.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
There are lots of factors that go into success or non-success of a company. Technical inclination, long vs. short term goals, staying in touch, over/under management, etc. But, the number one determinant, which I didn't see a post on, is money.
I've started a few companies, and though not rich myself, everyone I've ever dealt with in the business community is. And only 1 person out of roughly two hundred was not rich prior to starting their company. And, universally, what was the single fact best correlated to their company's success? How rich they were before they started tho company.
Gates was rich, and went to Harvard, a school, primarily (especially in 1973) for rich kids. That's where he met Balmer. Money begets connections, which beget success. Other than being rich, the most important thing about Gates was that he isn't stupid.
I can't find an online bio of Ellison or McNealy, but dollars to doughnuts, their daddies were rich and well connected. Do Horatio Alger stories happen? Yes, of course. Andrew Carnegie was one. That's part of the reason why you hear so much about it, it makes good PR to project the image that most successful people "earned it."
But, in the common use of the word, it's not true. Under, over, and mis-management all matter, as do brains, staying in touch, technical knowledge, and people skills. But, the most important of these is a *distant* second to money and the connections it brings. Actually, the most important in this group might be third, since my guess is that luck is second most important. (Though you do, to a large extent, make your own luck.)
Is this mere cynicism? No. I wish the world were different, true, but it is not, so, in order to act most effectively, one must understand the reasons for things. I don't mind that people are rich. I do mind when they attribute it to their "brilliance" when the empirical facts (and I do study the subject) simply do not support such an assertion.
It's a complicated subject, and I'm not saying that rich=success. I am saying that, in the equation for success, rich has the biggest factor in front of it.
I would apply Machiavelli's chapter on mercenaries to consultants more than anything else.
Clearly there were some bad business plans during the "boom," but what really killed these companies was not bad business plans per se, but management that focused solely on increasing the stock price of the company.
In short, there was less money to be made in building a solid business than there was in erecting the shell of a business and spending money keeping it afloat until after an IPO. The original investors could then sell their shares at vastly inflated prices and abandon ship. The people building these shell companies could easily quadruple their money. Building an actual profitable company is much harder, and the proceeds are generally far smaller.
On another note. I think that you will find that Free Software service companies (like RedHat) are the wave of the future. The reason for this is simple, they are targetting a business sector that has an absolutely astounding profit margin. Microsoft currently has a profit margin of over 30%. There is still plenty of money to be made undercutting Microsoft's prices. You might not put a $5000 stereo in your fiat, but ask WalMart which stereos make the most money and they will tell you that they make far more money selling $100 stereos than all of the $5000 stereo vendors put together.
Several of the European tax systems do this.
Germany for example, if you sell within a year you pay capital gains tax, after a year its free.
What makes Cringely think there is any real business goal here, other than looting the assets of the companies in most of these cases, or eliminating comp-, er, "consolidating markets", to begin with?
Cringely strikes me as being too damned credulous to be a good reporter. He should realize that most businessmen these days are fucking liars and cheats from the word go. They have to be, or they won't be businessmen for very long, the way things are done these days. Just because the lies are respectable and accepted with a blind eye does not make them any more truthful. The operative maxim is merely "don't get caught". Like Enron, Worldcom, QWest, Adelphia, etc, etc. etc., who were set up for the fall to begin with.
They wouldn't be able to get away with so much if journalists weren't for the most part anymore such obliging tools who go along with the sham. I ran across an honest editor the other day, though,- nearly crapped my drawers, and, paradoxically, it threw a wrench in a little plan I had going to catch some mf'ers out- so maybe there's hope.
Maybe even hope somebody with some reach will start looking into why things are so fucked up, which goes back to governments. But I'm not holding my breath. Just holding my nose while people like Cringely belabor the obvious, invariably in the service, witting or not, of those who would gain (if you can call it that) by matters being made even worse.
--rgb
When I started reading the title of the article, I thought that discribed exactly how my company is headed. Management gone reorganazation mad, gone meeting happy (they think the phrase 'the meetings will continue until productivity improves' is good advice rather than a joke), thinking that huge levels of processes and procedures to follow aren't added beurocracy. These are all examples of how my company is managing itself to death.
:P
I work at Sun.
-- posted anon to protect the guilty
Your description of the V.C. wasted by those yahoos (a term that long predates the portal) reminds me of how gov't behaves whenever the taxpayers approve a bond measure. Oh boy, money from nowhere! But guess who ultimately pays for it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
...to establish a black list for the purpose of identifying incompetent managers.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Rounds of layoffs, stifling of any creativity. It seems like there's an overwhelming drive towards mediocrity, and an actual fear of high performers, because they would be hard to replace. Oh yeah, and Open Source, which was our darling for a few years, saving us big time, and performing hard is now being replaced with W2K. It's better to run mainstream, so you can hire some MCSE balloon sculptor, than it is to do "great things". Bah.
So you think IBM in a couple of years when Linux is established will continue to spend billions on development that they don't get anything for? It will simply not happen.
Having been a Tech Support professional for several years, I can say that this is the number 1 reason why the quality of tech support has declined throughout the industry. There's a huge push in many companies to make Tech Support into either a profit center, or to minimize the expense of "answering the phones". To that end, the once vibrant job of support rep is now nothing but pure drudgery.
Typically, the management is "business-based" rather than "technically-based" and so they think like accountants. Things that make sense on their spreadsheet don't always make sense in the real world.
Such organizations do not value employees that are multitalented. they tend to force people into a narrowly defined role, with no chance for growth, or advancement, or exploring other ways to help customers besides just answering as many calls as possible, getting the customer off the phone as quickly as possible (never mind solving their problem) - as a result - workers who are bright, creative, more likely to solve problems, are hounded out of such organizations as "poor performers" etc. I've seen this happen more times than I care to recall for you here. And as I call in to support lines at other companies, I see things are much the same everywhere. The trend is away from salaried competent professionals, towards hourly-paid mindless phone monkeys. And this trend is driven by "business-based" management. Where I've worked, when the managers were technical people, it may not have been a volume business, but customers were happy, because when they did get through to a support rep, they talked to someone who could answer their problem. In other organizations where I worked under non-technical people, it was quite the opposite.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Sun and Oracle are suffering precisely because their fanatical founders are still in control! Buisness want's to deal with buisness, not fanatics. It's why Linux suffers so much. No one wants to see RMS, Ellison or McNealey stand up on stage and shout paranoia and diatribe at them. All they want is a solution. Rational discourse. You don't get that from Sun or Oracle anyone that's ever delt with them will tell you that. Oracle especially. They provide nothing. Every single tiny feature will cost you an extra 10 grand. They are both stuck in old buisness models lead by insane mouth pieces. It's no wonder they are dying.
The corporate managers, VC's, bankers, fundmanagers and stockbrokers are part of a tacit conspiracy to rip off small investors and pension fund savers. The tech companies are just pawns in their game. the dot com boom was the most obvious example. The dot commers probably acted in good faith, but we know that the bankers (Goldman Sachs etc) knew thay were hyping hot air.
It's an obvious example and is prominently mentioned in the article.
Did (selective) bias prompt the poster to mention Microsoft competitors and ignore MS?
* We are going to give away this huge product and sell this tiny thing thats optional. If you do this you have just teached your customers that a huge product doesn't cost anything, and then it doesn't make any sense to pay for a tiny part. This is how peoples minds work. Any business-oriented person knows this but tech-people apperently does not.
Do business-oriented people also know about verb conjugation, and subject-verb agreement?
Fact is, technical people are not to blame for any of these. Bad business models are begotten by bad business people. Whether the businessperson's background is in technology or hog-farming is irrelevant.
I sympathize with your theory here about a rivision to the capital gains tax to prevent abuses. We used to have a tax system that was oppressive against capital gains in the 1970's, and it brought capital investment to a standstill.
I agree that the current system is flawed, as stock ownership is no longer regarded as giving a small loan to a company. Yet, we still need a way for small company's with an uncertain future to tap capital when necessary. I fear that if short term gains are not allowed, many of those with money will have little incentive to invest.
Personally, I am not too worried about any of that stuff. I believe the rule of business should be caveat emptor. There will be abuses, but I don't think the cost of those abuses is greater than the cost to society in lost capital...
Its a sad fact, but going all the way back to the jews forced to live on the island Ghetto in Venice till now, society has always had a tense relationship with those who have money and are willing to lend it. We can rant and rave, but we need their money.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Just a quick question. I have read a lot about this show on /. but I have never been able to catch it. Does anybody know which channel broadcasts this show in Washington DC area? I checked WETA's schedule but didn't see this program on the list.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a tongue in cheek satire about the ruling class itself. However, despite his intentions, the ruling class completely missed the point and saw the book as a "guide." Today it's still good reading as both a Satire and guide at the same time.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"Kevin Coleman, the former chief strategist of Netscape. I worked with him before, not at Netscape, and he will destroy your company if he ever gets his hands on it."
You mean C.P. Thompson wasn't the only waste of skin at that company?
C.P. was in charge of Technical Support, and sent to Stream to tech their techies how to support Netscape. His presentation was little more than a pep-rally speech, the kind of thing you'd expect a salesdroid to present as part of a dog-and-pony show to a potential customer, devoid of any clue that he had even used Netscape in his life.
But what do expect from a company whose co-founder once said, "We don't have time to do it right."
I don't think McNealy was the founder of Sun. He was there pretty early on, sure, but I don't think he was a founder. Bill Joy, if I recall correctly, was one of the founders. I think, if I recollect, that McNealy was originally brought in to head up manufacturing.
in today's greedy environment people would hold onto stocks only if they produce high dividends in the short term, today's investor will not stick around if the company said that profits will suck for the next year because we need to look out for our future. They would sell and by something that performs in the short term...
If fact it kinda works that way now... Companies that produse earnings growth consistantly grow consistantly in stock price, regardless of whether or not the business is getting healthier. So the CEO's with their stock options cut everything in sight to maintain growth, so they can boost the price and sell thier options.
The real problem is that it is very difficult to tell the difference between healty and unhealthy cutting...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Yeah, I tend to agree with you. Problem is, most of the people using Oracle made that purchasing decision quite a while ago - when the alternatives weren't so clear or plentiful.
.... but most "TCO surveys" fail to estimate in your true costs of doing a conversion. All those years your I.T. people have been learning and working with Oracle are going to be "down the tubes" after a migration. All the initial money you spent for the thing is for naught. Not to mention, all the time invested in moving the data, setting up Postgres or MySQL for your company's needs.
My last employer, for example, set up Oracle back when it shipped on floppy disks for the installation!
Once you have all your important/critical data in an Oracle database, it becomes nearly impossible to justify pulling it all back out and migrating to something new.
True, you grit your teeth every time that maintenance renewal fee comes up (another $35,000 please!)
I'd really question anyone just now planning a new Oracle database purchase -- but Oracle is probably living nicely off all those who bought into it years ago.
I don't agree with your assertion that tech people don't know sound business strategy and business/sales do. I think it's completely random whether someone has good business sense (actual good business sense), except they probably need to be pretty smart.
I've worked for two dot-com startups since I graduated. One founded by Marketing-type managers, the other founded by a Finance-type CEO. Neither situation worked out very well. They made the same mistakes that you outlined, because it was the thing to do! Given any choice between a long-term plan and the short-term plan, they took the short-term... every time! I wasn't impressed with 3 of the 4 Harvard MBAs that ran my first company. So they don't have a good track record in my book.
Who founds/is in charge of a company has a big effect on what the emphasis is at that company. The marketing people focused on visual design of the product, trade shows, giveaways, tshirts/vests/mugs, info sheets and the web site. The finance people focused on the bottom line, getting the most out of their money, working people as hard as they could, and then getting rid of them when they were burnt-out, firing the "bottom 10%". In both cases, the engineering team was very weak, and there was little focus on building things properly for robustness/speed/maintainablility. And their products suffered for it.
I DO agree that you need someone with business sense at the helm, or close to it. I think a business-savvy techincial guy is the best kind of person to have in charge of a tech company. A tech-savvy business/sales guy is less effective, and a non-tech-savvy business/sales guy is the pits to work for. Ideally, you'd have someone who knows how to run each department of the company efficiently for that department, or is down-to-earth enough to let people who know how to do it do their job.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Sure, but you know what? I don't really think this is a case of "non-business types" not understanding these concepts.
.com fiascos to illustrate his/her own usefulness and self-worth.
In fact, it irritates me when some "management type" uses examples such as the
In reality, most of these businesses were run by people trying to get rich quick. Everyone was playing games with investment capital that they didn't *really* care if they were ever able to pay back or not. They just wanted to build a big company for themselves, inflate their stock prices, sell out and move on to something else.
The masses got caught up in all the excitement - and started ignoring the obvious, that this was going to all come crashing down sooner or later. (Hey, why worry? You'll get lots of free stuff, attend some cool parties, and get an inflated salary designing web pages for a year or so, right!?)
Just get a Waterford and put a Schwinn head badge on it.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
This problem actually predates Oracle by quite a bit. There lots of people who have data in a creaky old mainframe database, that they'd like to move onto a more modern database but they can't due to the costs of migration. A lot of data is in IMS, which is so old (1968) that it predates relational database. Imagine having to do all the work that SQL does for you by yourself.
After being laid off from one such dotcom mudpit, I came up with the "Compost Model" to describe what I saw at my former employer. Perhaps "The Mythical Manager-Month" would be a good title for it as well; the engineering dept. rounded out at about 35% managers.
The "Compost Company" is characterized by the frequent addition of fresh, green layers of management on top, in the hopes that something useful will form at the bottom. Appointments of Senior Managers and Vice Presidents who have never worked for the company, "acquisitions" where managers of failed companies get senior appointments (to "save" the company from its own employees), and a general feeling that experience and technical skills are irrelevant are hallmarks of this type of organization.
"Demote from within" is the rule here, where experienced employees gradually lose standing and are pushed out. Perhaps the only promotion from within that I saw in several years was one of the ops people to manage the group because no one else would or could do it; he now has a fresh, green VP above him who wants to move all hosting onsite(!).
Dead layers are left to rot, perhaps due to the principle that managers never get fired. Simply adding an additional layer during each reorganization is the norm.
I lasted through several waves of this pattern, but when I eventually ended up working, four or five levels down from the CEO, for someone who hadn't been with the company for more than six months, with ten other people on a project that didn't require more than three, I could see the severance check coming.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Oh, lord. Not this myth, again. Yes, AD was run into the ground by hired-gun management. But contrary to Eve's delusional rant, the company wouldn't have survived under the management of social retard Philip Greenspun, either. AD was riding the dotcom boom, pure and simple -- even before the company took VC funding, it was heavily dependent on VC dollars that had been put into other companies that were its clients.
As for your other comments:
OpenACS is based on a version of the TCL ACS that was developed *after* Philip had been mostly kicked out, and that clearly violates several of the software design principles he preached. It's also not such a great product, though it's certainly better than the old ACS 3.x that was built on Philip's watch.
CCM is alive and well. The division of Redhat that consists of former AD people is profitable, and client sites are being delivered using CCM. Maybe it isn't "finished", but only in the sense that no software product is ever truly "finished".
Schwinns were always overpriced and of no better quality than other bikes. They rode on their name and not their product. I'm glad to see them gone.
The only way to bypass the power of the gun is via consensus. If the majority of the people refuse to participate in a feudal system, a feudal system cannot operate. At one point in time we had a Constitution in this country that provided a mechanism for organizing and obtaining consensus, but over the past two hundred years the mechanisms therein have been corrupted by (tada!) the power of the dollars in the hands of corporate elites to the point where the mechanisms of government are being used to move the United States towards its feudal future.
We are already well on the way to the fate of the Roman Empire.
-- Eric Lee Green BadTux News'n'Views
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Managing people is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for success in the computer business. A knowledge of the business is needed too. Someone selling hammers should know who uses hammers, what they use hammers for, and some basics about how hammers are built. Having quite painfully experienced what happens when a man whose sole claim to success is taking a trash hauling company to a successful IPO takes over a technology company, I know what Cringely was trying to say on a quite, err, personal, level.
--Eric Lee Green BadTux News'n'Views
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Sounds familiar!
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I have been providing services to high-tech companies for a decade, and my business has outlived those of most of my clients, [emphasis added]
I would think that a mark of success for an MBA providing services would be the number of companies that still are in business, rather than the number that aren't.
But I guess that's why I'm not an MBA.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Yeah, absolutely. Especially in the case of government offices, it seems like quite a bit of very important information is stuck inside outdated mainframes or minicomputers.
... so I get to hear a lot about their issues and problems.)
I should mention that I'm not personally a DBA. I know a little bit, but much of my information is second-hand. (I have many friends and contacts who are DBA's
Nonetheless, I suspect that anyone with mission-critical type data stored on a system constructed back around 1968 has othe pressing concerns that might cause the money to be coughed-up for a migration (whether it was Oracle or anything else modern). Often times, you can't really get repairs done to systems that old in reasonable amounts of time. If the hardware dies on you, what then? Even if you have a service contract with guaranteed service levels, I bet you're paying through the nose for it on systems that old. That sure would tip the tables in favor of a migration, right there.
I automatically shudder when I think of new bond package for this or that.
Who do you think funded all of those goofy business models? VCs! You know the expert managers who are supposed to know better.
Why did they do it? Are they stupid? No. They funded the ventures, bought off financial advisors willing to whore themselves for banking accounts, pushed booming IPOs, cashed out and moved on.
You are probably right that techies tend to not know much about pricing strategies. That's probably good since they rarely have any say in such things. What always amazes me (as someone who was originally a pure techie and now someone who lives in both worlds)is how many times as a techie I had to explain the basics of market segmentation, price elasticity, channel conflict, and so on to people whose JOB it was to do marketing for my products. None of this stuff is rocket science, but lots of people with fancy titles and education don't seem to know anything about their supposed areas of expertise. I have never met a C++ programmer who didn't know what a void pointer was, but I have met TONS of marketdroids who didn't know what a SKU was or what the difference between sales and marketing is. Why do you think that is?
If that pension fund owns more shares in the company than you own, they own a bigger chunk of the company and you need to think twice about calling it "your" company. As far as they are concerned, telling you how to run the company is simply protecting their investment.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Managers fall in love with their tools. What are their tools? Meetings, memos, policies, org charts, chains of command, manuals, task forces, consultants, management gurus, and paper forms are the favorite tools of managers, and managers fall in love with them. They generate vast empires of paperwork, rules, meetings, councils, and reviews and they forget that there's actually work to be done and organization tools are supposed to support the business, not substitute for it.
Money people fall in love with their tools too. Their tools are spreadsheets, projections, 10Qs, conference calls, analysis reports, and balance sheets. They convince themselves that if only they can get all the paperwork right the company will be a success and so they sacrifice everything including key employees with special skills and knowledge, long term growth, product quality, and every kind of good sense if it gets in the way of what they think is important. They forget that capital and record keeping are a means to the end of production, not a substitute for it.
Marketing people fall in love with their tools too. Their tools are slogans, ads, glossy packaging, press tours, focus groups, channel strategies, and (often less than honest) spinfests about what the product is and does. They convince themselves that actual product quality, production costs, operations, and development don't really matter. They forget that packaging and promotion exist in order to help move the product, they aren't a substitute for it.
It's worth considering what happens in governments where this syndrome is even more dangerous. Bureaucrats have tools they fall in love with too. They can take people's property, make grand plans, bring immortal bureaucratic agencies into being, give money to their friends, send police, and military forces around and force people to comply with their demands. They forget that people have all kinds of goals, products, and activities that are what's important in life. They forget that laws, police, and armies are a way of dealing with criminals and foreign armies, not a substitute for living and thinking for ourselves.
It is natural to think that your own work is more important, more complex, and more interesting than what everyone else is doing. That's why we see tunnel vision out there so frequently. Seeing the scope of damage that this problem causes in business and elsewhere should give us all reason to think twice before considering the value of what people with very different jobs to be so low or their requirements to simple. That goes in spades for technical companies where nothing is simple and where we don't have good historical guides for how things ought to be organized. We would all do better to stop falling love with our own tools. A cool and fun as they are to use, we need to remember that they are tools for accomplishing things, not ends in themselves.
...contrary to Eve's delusional rant, the company wouldn't have survived... AD was riding the dotcom boom, pure and simple -- even before the company took VC funding, it was heavily dependent on VC dollars that had been put into other companies that were its clients.
I don't know how you can claim to know this. It's pure conjecture. We have no way of knowing what other clients AD might or might not have had. Besides, last time I looked, Siemens was still around.
OpenACS is based on a version of the TCL ACS that was developed *after* Philip had been mostly kicked out, and that clearly violates several of the software design principles he preached. It's also not such a great product, though it's certainly better than the old ACS 3.x that was built on Philip's watch.
The only real difference between ACS and OpenACS is that the original ACS runs on top of Oracle, while OpenACS runs with Postgres. It's simply a port to a free, open source database. There's no other difference. I use/build/maintain both systems every day. The new OpenACS 4.x is a natural progression of ACS/TCL. The main difference between 4.x and 3.x is that 4.x is modular, with a package manager to add/remove modules. This required a bit of rewriting, but it's still basically the same thing.
As far as violating Greenspun's principles is concerned, I have no idea what you're referring to. But who cares whether some nebbish thinks a product strays from his own vision of the "one true path," as long as it works for the people who are using it. ACS/OpenACS is still as good as it ever was, for all the same reasons.
CCM is alive and well. The division of Redhat that consists of former AD people is profitable, and client sites are being delivered using CCM. Maybe it isn't "finished", but only in the sense that no software product is ever truly "finished".
Client sites have indeed been built using Redhat's CCM (a Java rewrite of ACS/TCL), but the software hasn't been republished, so the changes have not made it back to the original toolkit. The current release is still missing a lot compared to the TCL versions, and is nowhere near as well tested. Until whoever is building with CCM republishes with their additions, you're on your own developing with it. Plus, you need Oracle to run it.
One solution would be for exectutive bonuses to be held in escrow for one year and the award being contingent on the following year's results.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Just because the system was designed & implemented back then, doesn't mean the hardware is. IMS is a mainframe database. You can buy a brand new Z Series, and install IMS on it, so the data is 30 years old, but the hardware is 3 weeks old.
How can I claim to know this? Easy, I worked for AD, right up until its acquisition. While I wasn't intimately familiar with every client project, I had passing knowledge of most of them. The majority of them, during the company's profitable period, were shitty little dotcoms with absurd business plans and fat VC checks. Yeah, yeah, Siemens is still around. That's one client out of dozens.
As far as violating Greenspun's principles is concerned, I have no idea what you're referring to. But who cares whether some nebbish thinks a product strays from his own vision of the "one true path," as long as it works for the people who are using it. ACS/OpenACS is still as good as it ever was, for all the same reasons.
I agree, nobody should care if the product strays from Greenspun's vision -- but the article and discussion are partly about the supposed importance of founders and their vision. Greenspun liked to preach that abstraction was a hindrance and that modularity and reuse were overrated. He had a fairly low opinion of ACS 4.
Client sites have indeed been built using Redhat's CCM (a Java rewrite of ACS/TCL), but the software hasn't been republished, so the changes have not made it back to the original toolkit. The current release is still missing a lot compared to the TCL versions, and is nowhere near as well tested. Until whoever is building with CCM republishes with their additions, you're on your own developing with it. Plus, you need Oracle to run it.
No, you don't need Oracle to run it, any more -- I'm still in touch with the guys working on it, and it plays quite nicely with Postgres, these days.
The TCL version may have more bells and whistles. But internally most of the developers scoffed at a lot of the marketing literature that enumerated these things. You see, we knew that the bulk of the client sites we delivered reused only the user/groups data model and some basic utility procs, like the database connectivity. Most of the bells and whistles are useless for most sites. Sure, the Java version doesn't have 'ecommerce', while the TCL version does. So what? If you're building a site for a client with ecommerce requirements, there's maybe a 1% chance that you can actually use any of the ecommerce code in the TCL version -- it's so specific to one particular model of commerce and so poorly abstracted that you might as well toss it and build something from scratch.