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What If Yoda Ran IBM?
Esther Schindler writes to mention that one IT leader who came from big business found himself in quite another world when he transitioned into a smaller business, specifically with respect to the amount of attention from their vendors. He presents an amusing approach with a familiar twist. "Not only are the IBMs of the world leaving money on the table, they're also risking future sales. The IT leaders at small organizations will in many cases be employed by larger organizations someday. Why alienate them? Vendors could engage IT leaders in small organizations now and build brand loyalty. How could they make such a business model work? Let's imagine (with apologies to George Lucas) what Yoda might do if he were running a large consultancy."
Which might be a Good Thing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Tag: stillsuckitwould :-)
These build a healthy industry in which you can play. Complete dominance of an industry is unhealthy (look at Old IBM or M$). Having competition gives you feedback which is vital for the long term success of a company. Trying to be all things to all people dilutes your business strategy too. Far better to leave some opportunites unexploited.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
All Yoda would have to do is look at any company and just say: "No, too old"
Some of the companies would then get really bent out of shape and turn evil later, while other ones would just annoy Yoda until he gave up and threw them a support contract he never has to fulfill since he dies!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Well, let's see. If Yoda ran IBM of the 1980's like he ran the Jedi Counsel, he'd probably remain fixed in his devotion to the old ways, overlook some growing threat and then watch helplessly as the order he watched over was overcome and twisted into an empire of unimaginable might.
Wow. Thank goodness that didn't happen.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
"During my first year at Sequoia I concentrated on improving the processes that affect operational excellence." ... I annoyed the F*&%( out of the people who did the real work.
"With these processes largely working, I must now spend my time providing a technological vision" .. when they started ignoring me, I came up with lots of useless documents, to pretend that I was actually worth the ridiculous sum I was paid.
But once our mighty Vista of Death is completed ... no one will be able to stand up against
Emperor Gates ...
We will find and finally destroy iRebels!
I have been saying this same thing for years with regards to IBM's AS/400 platform. Anybody who has every worked with one of these machines will tell you that they are absolutely, hands-down, the greatest database box available today.
But.
The only people running Os/400 are huge financial institutions who's annual I.T. budget ranges in the Millions of dollars. I can't get a copy of OS/400 to play with. Just can't do it. Not unless i want to spend a month's salary on it. Even then, i can't really DO anything with it (maybe have one connection to the database at a time).
Now take linux/mysql. I use this combo ALL OVER THE PLACE. Any time i need to throw a database down, its a linux box with Mysql. Every. Single. Time.
Why?
Because i grew up playing around in redhat, suse, mandrake, and gentoo boxes and I feel like i know linux inside and out (although i'm sure i don't). I have complete confidence in myself to order some hardware, install a distro on it, and have a database up and crunching within a day.
I have NEVER tried this with an IBM product because i simply CAN'T! I can't risk that significant of a portion of my budget for a toy that I may or may not be able to get working in time.
I guess it works the same as what happened to my beloved coke machine today. They upped the price to $1.25. Nobody drinks coke anymore except the people who are REALLY addicted to it.
Bastards.
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Actually, I think he could do it equally well in C++, following some special guidelines. Within a given program, either all loops would either begin with "do", or none of them would. In addition, Yoda's code would never use exception handling.
"Begun, this clone war has".
(in reference to the emergence of Compaq)
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Okay, look at the reality of what this guy is asking for:
Sales time. Believe it or not, good sales people cost a lot of money. You have the choice of hiring a bad salesperson, who doesn't know what he's talking about or doing, or a good one. So a salesperson will run you, even in a crappy small company, $60k per year (plus 20% for bennies and taxes). Now, IBM needs someone who is, shall we say, better than good. They have lots of products, and they have to be able to deal with everyone from an analyst to a CIO. Not only that, but they have team behind them, usually comprised of some inside people and a sales engineer or two, to answer questions.
So, realistically, you have about $500,000 in salaries, commissions, and benefits in a small sales team.
Let's divide that by $25k. 25/500 = 20. That means that the sales guy, just to cover his costs, has to sell 20 deals a year to small businesses to make a living. Oh, wait. That's not the case. He needs to make a decent profit, as well. Lets put it at 25% or so, conservatively. So we're up to $625,000, or 25 deals a year.
Oh, wait. That doesn't include the salaries of the engineer who does the work. Tack on an extra $150k or so for a top notch "Jedi Master". And that would be cheap. So were' up to $650k plus 25% margin, or $812,500. Or about 32.5 deals per year.
Now, we all know that even a lightsabre wielding Jedi Master sales guy won't close every deal. So lets say, which is a huge gimme, that he can close 50% of the deals he is given. So he must now, conservatively, talk to 65 customers a year, bare minimum, to earn back his money and make a little profit.
Oh, shit, we forgot expenses. You know, office space, cell phones, internet, computers, support, travel, lunches, dinners, visits to strip clubs.
Tack on another $50k per year for that. Or 2 more deals closed (we're up to 34.5, if you were paying attention) or 69 customers talked to if he was lucky.
That means we're averaging more than a deal closed per week, and, let me tell you, it doesn't happen that way.
And we haven't even scratched the surface of expenses, including things like marketing, customer acquisition costs, back end support costs.
The reason that IBM doesn't do this isn't because they don't want to. Its because they *CAN NOT*. This is not their business. They have a defined business plan. I can guarantee you that nowhere in that plan do they deal directly with SMB's for $25k deals.
Instead, they have a very established partner network to deal with this. And some of those partners are quite good, quite knowledgeable, and employ guys with as much if not more experience than some of those IBM engineers. Sure, there are bozos. But if you do due dilegence in selecting a partner, you should be able to eliminate those quickly and quietly, especially if you have big business experience.
Note: all of the big boys have a partner network. IBM, HP, EMC, Cisco. Plus all the others. Every single one. Some of them have gone to the extent of putting their top partners into their traditional stronghold space of Fortune 1000. Cisco is notable for having put partners into their Named Accounts many years ago.
As full disclosure, I work for a company that has, at one time or the other, partnered with every one of those guys. Some of those partnerships were great. Some were a disaster. In every single one, we had highly qualified engineers with decades of experience in multi-discipline IT skills supporting our customers. In fact, one of those partners (won't name them but their one of the biggest of the big) used to slip us business on the side when the customer was unwilling to pay their rates (~$350/hour, travel exclusive) because they knew we could do the same job at less than half the cost.
The point of being a small IT specialty business is to be able to provide a service to a completely different kind of customer. My company has ~25 full time employees in house. We have 450 or so on-sit
Desks, lower would they be.
AT&ROFLMAO