4 ms·

How did the management at two successful companies that had delivered great products for a long period of time get so shitty so fast?

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
The 90s was, in retrospect and sort of at the time, one hell of a decade.
SixSigma 11y ago
By trying to beat MicroSoft rather than servicing customer needs.
- hga 11y ago
  That would be Sun, right? Particularly Scott McNealy: https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft (not needed SGI's special sauces, almost all my direct experience here is with Sun and DEC). In addition, the two biggest and interlocked problems with them that I know of are their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design, required customers to sign NDAs before they would try to fix it, and then blamed the customers and the supplier of the SRAM chips for their non-fault tolerant design. Instead of, you know, the IBM ethos of fixing the customer's problem. Related, in terms of zapping the other channels of sales that might have saved them, was a total internal sales focus on enterprise sales. If you weren't making enterprise sized purchases, several million dollars worth, you were sent to a 3rd party like a VAR, but they typically wouldn't give you the time of day, they certainly were difficult to deal with when I worked with companies that bought one or two Sun workstations. Adding a web site that allowed direct purchases mostly added salt to the wound. What this meant was that startups that needed more Sun kit than they could charge to a credit card on that web site were forced to go with Dell, who's machines weren't as good, but had the strange property of being willing and able to sell them (HP's sales operation was too screwed up at the time to be a big player here). So a bunch of companies learned how to make do with Dell servers, and the successful ones never looked at Sun when they got big enough. So they missed out on the big post dot.com sales. A final straw when they started struggling was reducing the quality of their systems, e.g. saving one chip on a motherboard by using a chipset Marvel controller instead of the well tested and trusted Intel one. And I read that Joylent stopped buying Sun hardware when they started silently changing the lights out hardware they were shipping in their systems (IPMI or the like).
  - the_why_of_y 11y ago
    > their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design Yeah, that one was a huge. Sourcing those cache chips from IBM, and just trusting them not to knowingly supply ones that emit radioactive radiation was such an amateur move. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-hardware/mcnealy-blames-ibm-for-sun-s-server-memory-flaws.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-hardwa... http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO66102,00.html http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
    - hga 11y ago
      It's inevitable, the only question is at what rate the materials in your chips will emit them, and what are the consequences. Smart companies spend a little extra for parity/EEC, they don't blame their customers for machine room environmental non-optimality unless they're really sure that's the problem. He also didn't deny the "sign the NDA if you want us to (pretend to) address the problem". Bottom line, he and Sun didn't own the problem, didn't take care of their customers until too much bad PR was generated, and again dealt with it at least as much as a PR problem for Sun than as a problem for their customers. A bad idea when there are other companies out there offering better enterprise level stuff. Or as a DEC book put it, looking back on the frothy '70s minicomputer market, the companies that won did an adequate job of everything, didn't drop the ball on any of the essential things like documentation and support. Certainly no one bought DEC equipment for their disk drives....

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

The 90s was, in retrospect and sort of at the time, one hell of a decade.

SixSigma 11y ago

By trying to beat MicroSoft rather than servicing customer needs.

hga 11y ago
That would be Sun, right? Particularly Scott McNealy: https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft (not needed SGI's special sauces, almost all my direct experience here is with Sun and DEC). In addition, the two biggest and interlocked problems with them that I know of are their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design, required customers to sign NDAs before they would try to fix it, and then blamed the customers and the supplier of the SRAM chips for their non-fault tolerant design. Instead of, you know, the IBM ethos of fixing the customer's problem. Related, in terms of zapping the other channels of sales that might have saved them, was a total internal sales focus on enterprise sales. If you weren't making enterprise sized purchases, several million dollars worth, you were sent to a 3rd party like a VAR, but they typically wouldn't give you the time of day, they certainly were difficult to deal with when I worked with companies that bought one or two Sun workstations. Adding a web site that allowed direct purchases mostly added salt to the wound. What this meant was that startups that needed more Sun kit than they could charge to a credit card on that web site were forced to go with Dell, who's machines weren't as good, but had the strange property of being willing and able to sell them (HP's sales operation was too screwed up at the time to be a big player here). So a bunch of companies learned how to make do with Dell servers, and the successful ones never looked at Sun when they got big enough. So they missed out on the big post dot.com sales. A final straw when they started struggling was reducing the quality of their systems, e.g. saving one chip on a motherboard by using a chipset Marvel controller instead of the well tested and trusted Intel one. And I read that Joylent stopped buying Sun hardware when they started silently changing the lights out hardware they were shipping in their systems (IPMI or the like).
- the_why_of_y 11y ago
  > their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design Yeah, that one was a huge. Sourcing those cache chips from IBM, and just trusting them not to knowingly supply ones that emit radioactive radiation was such an amateur move. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-hardware/mcnealy-blames-ibm-for-sun-s-server-memory-flaws.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-hardwa... http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO66102,00.html http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
  - hga 11y ago
    It's inevitable, the only question is at what rate the materials in your chips will emit them, and what are the consequences. Smart companies spend a little extra for parity/EEC, they don't blame their customers for machine room environmental non-optimality unless they're really sure that's the problem. He also didn't deny the "sign the NDA if you want us to (pretend to) address the problem". Bottom line, he and Sun didn't own the problem, didn't take care of their customers until too much bad PR was generated, and again dealt with it at least as much as a PR problem for Sun than as a problem for their customers. A bad idea when there are other companies out there offering better enterprise level stuff. Or as a DEC book put it, looking back on the frothy '70s minicomputer market, the companies that won did an adequate job of everything, didn't drop the ball on any of the essential things like documentation and support. Certainly no one bought DEC equipment for their disk drives....