8 ms·

Why GE Digital Failed

104 points by theomega 8y ago

bubbabojangles 8y ago
As a customer of GE software products, I've seen their core products falter a bit while they attempted to prop up the Predix platform. Maybe it will be a breath of fresh air when/ if they sell Predix, hoping that they will focus more on their core products. It is difficult to sell a platform to industrial customers, as many of the ideas are too abstract to understand what it can do for you and how much money it will make for you.
- ovi256 8y ago
  This could very well be an electricity like situation. If you have a factory moving on a pre-electricity prime-mover (probably a coal engine) and distribution system (probably axes and belts everywhere) and some one comes and pitches you electricity, you don't see the advantages. You see the costs of putting electric motors in all your machines, hiring all these expensive electric engineers and technicians, and basically rebuilding your factory for electricity. I see a similar dilemma here. Most industrial units will have to be rebuilt to take advantage of industrial IoT.
  - karmicthreat 8y ago
    Its not quite that bad. You can have a plant edge device that pulls information out of your plant PLCs. Maybe without code changes on the PLC. This data can then go into an analytics platform for whatever reporting you want. The problem is nobody sees much value in the reporting.
    - laythea 8y ago
      I work in the industry and would agree. Also, nobody has software intelligent enough to extract the value out of the data. Maybe one day.
ovi256 8y ago
Are there any succesful examples of digital transformation ? I know digital transformation is the thing to do if you're in strategy or management consulting, so I hope to get some input from practitioners, or anyone who witnessed one. Derisively, my impression is that an organisation like GE will have to go through garbage collection while one (or why not more) digital native organisations take its place, in order for the new organisation to be a digital native. But I have no idea if being a digital native is even necessary. Most GE business units seem to be doing just fine with their accumulated capital of all kinds and their economies of scale.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  Are you kidding? There are hundreds of successful digital transformation stories.
  - drewhart75 8y ago
    Can you list a handful of the hundreds?
    - tootie 8y ago
      The entirety of Wall St has gone digital and some of those banks are 100 years old. Walmart is another good example.
    - StreamBright 8y ago
      10: https://www.cio.com/article/3149977/digital-transformation/digital-transformation-examples.html https://www.cio.com/article/3149977/digital-transformation/d... 12: https://www.brainbridge.be/news/top-12-real-world-digital-transformation-success-stories https://www.brainbridge.be/news/top-12-real-world-digital-tr... I am quite amazed the closed mindedness of some of the people commenting here
- virusduck 8y ago
  While not really the same, how about HBO? I think HBO is a stunning example, as they were an early leader in (invented?) a dedicated movie-delivery method. I'd argue that their original lifeblood (cable movie channel) is largely dead, but yet they flourish. A large part is because they embraced the digital world, knowing that they had to create something worth paying for. The take away I see is that "digital transformation" is more than going online or providing services, you still have to have something that people actually want to buy.
le-mark 8y ago
Yet at the same time, GE Digital was given a P&L and had to make quarterly commitments on performance. The revenue was tied to the work it was doing with internal GE business units and one-off partnerships with outside software companies. So when Predix integrated with a new partner, the focus was usually on generating short-term revenue and not long-term value to GE's end customers. Short term profit seeking is a cancer upon us all, is there no way out of this hell?
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Venture capital?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Out of the frying pan, into the fire. You'll be trading the focus on reasonable but short-term returns for a focus on 10x mid-time returns.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    Worked for Twitter! oh...
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  > Short term profit seeking is a cancer upon us all, is there no way out of this hell? Take your firm private with investors that are focused on long term goals, not short term profits. Why bother with public markets if private markets provide sufficient capital to execute?
  - sah2ed 8y ago
    Private markets is also the route that Elon Musk is considering with Tesla, similar to how SpaceX is structured where employees and sophisticated investors can sell shares every six months [0]. This will also solve his constant antagonism towards short sellers. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/how-elon-musk-s-spacex-may-be-a-road-map-for-tesla-going-private https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/how-elon-...
jdhn 8y ago
As someone who worked for a branch of GE, I'm surprised it took this long for people to realize that it wasn't all sunshine and roses. This is the key quote in the article for me: >Then, one year later, in 2014, GE released a press release that said it was generating more than $1 billion in revenue from productivity solutions, highlighting Predix. Like the article says, the vast majority of this $1 billion came from counting the revenue from any product that utilized Predix/GE Digital resources, no matter how much they contributed. I also never heard of any outside company that utilized GE Digital resources, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
throwawayge 8y ago
As a GE SW developer, I could chime in. Regarding digital transformation, this should not come as surprise but there is an incredible tension and misalignment between a GE core pushing for a platform and different businesses. The issue is that businesses have roadmaps where they need to release new products each year, and it does not take into account having to rewrite everything or huge part from scratch to get some longer term platform benefits. So in the end the adoption is an issue. I joined GE just before Predix introduction, and no one in my business rushed to adopt it. As a matter of fact, now that GE digital is going to be divested, that was likely the smart move. Moreover, the product I am working on, is based on the "GE platform" effort of a few years prior. Platform that has no longer any official support (the maintenance team is one guy somewhere in the world) and that has re fragmented in every different product it was used in. The lack of support is not really an issue because the framework has been battle tested but on the other hand, there is no obvious benefits coming from having an "almost-common" core between applications or devices. So as business it makes you wary to adopt the last idea coming from GE digital or GE central, event it makes absolute sense on paper, because you have no idea how long they will commit to that idea. This is really a chicken-egg problem, because no one wants to use a zombie platform, and no one wants to spend support on a platform no one uses. Maybe on a more positive note, even if I have not seen much direct impact on GE digital products, GE SW culture has changed. When I joined, SW was kinda neglected, more seen as a liability than anything, and now at last we have moved to more modern tools with CI pipelines, focus on devops and so on. But this is more like a grassroots effort. But I don't feel anymore that we are using a sw stack and tools totally outdated.
- le-mark 8y ago
  How's the culture? Are devs actually busy and productive or is the the typical never ending wait for requirements to materialize that's so common at moribund large enterprises?
  - throwawayge 8y ago
    I certainly cannot speak for all teams, but most teams are fairly autonomous as long as they deliver. Like any big company, there are lots of stakeholders so that means that final decisions, for example a feature being in or out of scope, can take an unnecessary long time, but it does not mean you are stuck waiting. There are always lots of things to implement, refactor or improve that do not require a seal of approval.
nimbius 8y ago
>GE was going to own the industrial internet. I have a friend that works in mechanical maintenance. Heck, i used to work for him while i was putting myself through automotive trade school. Mitsui, Mitutoyo, Kuka, and Motoman not to mention Fanuc are all household names for industry automation based on a well defined platform of experience dragging back more than 30 years. Hell, even mitsubishi controllers are massively more invested in tooling and automation than GE ever could be. And, they listen to customers...theyre open by default. I can plug motor control data and Fanuc probe logic systems into my Infinity QS SPC software and get accurate runout and ID/OD grind data in REAL TIME. no licenses required because in machining or component part shops that are large enough, its more important to meet JIT deadlines than it is to pay licenses (they get paid after the fact, and vendors are happy to subscribe to this model.) The only GE stuff we used was in the substation transformers used by the building to feed power to the cymbal cutters and CNC systems in the shop. never networked, because it didnt have to be.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  Having worked on Fanuc robots for more than 2 years, I can attest that it is an extremely closed system. Want more registers for variables on your robot program? Shell out $10k. EVERYTHING is closed and proprietary; once you go Fanuc, you as a customer is doomed for paying them whatever they ask because the ROI of switching is more than paying them for insane things like controller registers. Don't even think about ANY open source components or anything of the sort found in the software industry.
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    This is definitely true of Fanuc, but not a lot else. Even the fiber interconnects are open protocols (regardless of how often implemented they are). At the low end, you have modbus for everything (yes, it sucks latency wise even over tcp, yes, people can't number crap reasonably, etc. It works in the end). Ethernet/IP is not a bad step up (I use it with 0 rockwell components). All my VFD's can be controlled with the same PLC code because of OVDA standards. Ethercat is also fairly nice (and higher end CNC machines often just have everything from I/O to servo's on a single ethercat bus). It's more complicated, but i expect that will change over time. Right now I have no problems connecting my siemens, mitsubishi, etc servos, field i/o, pneumatic valves, etc together over Ethernet/IP. Even lower end PLC's from automationdirect support it just fine. (I've done Ethercat a few times as well, it's just harder to deal with on the software side ATM unless you go with beckhoff stuff)
PaulHoule 8y ago
For me the television ads were a "bad smell", just as they were for IBM Watson. Somebody should start an ETF which disinvests in B2B companies that run bullshit ads.
- SlightRespect 8y ago
  Yeah, I never understood who those ads were aimed at. Buying a superbowl ad for a bunch of money to hit millions of consumers in hopes of a single CEO with buy authority watching the ad?
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    For one thing it keeps the media sweet. For all those years in which the Archer Daniels Midland corporation ran ads on Sunday morning political talk shows, ADM got to scam the government and consumers for billions thanks to subsidies they were able to get.
  - ralphc 8y ago
    My guess is they're for the thousands of people who could potentially invest in the company.
- icedchai 8y ago
  Those GE ads were hysterical (are? I don't watch much TV anymore...)
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Their current one plays the women in STEM fiddle in much the same way. It actually has some social merit if you disregard the reality of working for GE.
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  After seeing a few of the ads, I went and looked at their HR website to see what kind of jobs they had open. Their HR website was all flash, around the time when it was obvious to any competent engineer that flash was going the way the dodo. It also didn't work. (It was one of those websites where someone spent a lot of time concentrating on graphics but didn't really know how to get it to work.) "Bad smell" was an understatement.
sgt101 8y ago
"Digital transformation initiatives don't need thousands of people. They need a small team with very little time and very little money." Ok, think this through. Big businesses have money. They can create small teams easily. Creating a short term team with not much money is in the power of every company in the fortune 500, heck, it's in the power of the top 10,000 companies... And yet we do not see these teams doing these transformations. Shure we see teams creating "friendly digital employee pals" and "Machine learning driven employee survey feedback tools" but what we do not see is small, underfunded teams rapidly changing the face of business. Because... it's hard. In reality, although executives love the message "small team, no money, fast" the translation that they should be using is "a way of wasting a bit of money and time doing something that will definitely fail"
- ncheek 8y ago
  In addition to it being hard to rapidly change the face of business, these teams can be doomed to failure by virtue of the restrictive environment that they exist in - for example having to work within the sprawling policies of the business. I had an opportunity to work in a small digital transformation project at one of these "big businesses". When they had me come in every day and do basically nothing for 2 weeks before they could check all the boxes to ship me an engineering computer, I got the first big glimpse of how big business bureaucracy can doom these sorts of lean teams to failure.
kulu2002 8y ago
This article gives some really good points to be considered by organisation planning to ride on wave of 'Digital Transformation'
_coveredInBees 8y ago
That GE Digital failed, is no surprise to folks like me who worked (left there a couple of years back just before things got especially bad with layoffs) at GE's R&D labs and were always skeptical of the flashy sales pitch surrounding GE Digital/Industrial Internet with very little to back it up. When I tried to look into playing with Predix and utilizing it on GE projects I was working on, it boggled my mind that they wanted to charge me, a GE employee, money to use Predix on projects for GE. That of course meant that internal adoption of Predix was negligible unless mandated by higher ups, and if your own company isn't going to adopt and improve the product, I sure as hell don't see why anyone external to GE would. Apart from that, GE Digital was a fundamentally mismanaged effort. The people in charge seemed more interested in talking the talk rather than walking the walk. Most people at San Ramon seemed very disillusioned and their frustrations were out in the open during any of the company-wide all-hands meetings with a Q&A component.
- philipodonnell 8y ago
  > it boggled my mind that they wanted to charge me, a GE employee, money to use Predix on projects for GE. This is common in very large companies because an easy way to justify a new business unit it to claim it will pay for itself by charging other business units as well as external customers.
  - _coveredInBees 8y ago
    Oh yes, I understand that, but as the article points out, focusing on this short-term revenue metric is such a flawed approach to something like the GE Digital / Predix concept since it was a completely new product that desperately needed widespread adoption to be successful. You can't "transform" an industrial company into one that is at the forefront of software / "digital" with that approach. At least if they let their own teams / businesses use it with minimal friction, they'd have a much better shot at someone coming up with good applications for their product that they could potentially sell externally.
vinceguidry 8y ago
Shortsightedness in American business never fails to amaze me. You would think that a company as old as GE would be able to recognize the difference between capex and opex, but these sorts of missteps still seem absurdly common. Even GE still struggles to understand software. It gives me hope that software engineers will become the next class of power players and the whole thing isn't going to get subsumed into finance like everything else. Even Apple is falling prey these days to finance-thinking.
- twunde 8y ago
  GE has really taken a significant step down under Jeff Immelt's tenure (how much is his fault is up for question). It certainly is no longer the place to go for managerial excellence. The people that are good, leave. The managerial rotation system leads to managers that make decisions for the short-term. The decisions just need to be good enough for the manager to get a promotion and then it's someone else's problem. Other issues have been being late and a dollar short to most things, requiring GE to spend $$$$ to be a late entry. Source: Multiple family members have worked for GE
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Welch turned the company into an agglomeration of warring fiefdoms. They are doomed to consume themselves. He got out because he knew the mess he created was unfixable.
option_greek 8y ago
I work in a conglomerate that is in the middle of digital transformation. The problems we see are exactly the same as stated in the article: 1) Incumbent IT/Dev teams eating millions of dollars creating roadblocks every where for the newer teams 2) Expected to bill the newer platforms to existing business divisions 3) Red-tape and bureaucracy all over the place - Loads of approvals needed to do something simple like setting up dev environments 4) Top down planning for 'transformation'. No inputs are ever sought from new teams on anything To sum it up -> doomed before even starting
- ptero 8y ago
  It is a universal phenomenon -- large incumbent teams will fight to entrench systems even as they are failing. With senior leadership help firewall and replace can work. That is, firewall support for existing systems to old team and make new team build new setup. But it is really hard -- old guard will fight to kill new process after every mistake and new teams will try to kill existing systems prematurely.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Especially when the old team is obviously going to be fired if the new team works.
    - ptero 8y ago
      It does not have to be this way. The fact that new system is developed by a brand new team is because the old team has dug in and would not support moving to the new technology. But even when the old system is decommissioned there is no need to fire the old team. It does happen, but because everyone who is capable of finding a new project moved there and whoever is left cannot or doesn't want to do anything else.
cashsterling 8y ago
I had the sense that GE didn't know what they were doing withe Predix and their whole industrial internet strategy. It seemed like some executive went to a 'innovation conference' and drank the kool-aid about industry 4.0 and IoT... came back to the office, slapped a 10-slide deck together for the board of directors framing a strategy to take over market space built around acquiring a promising company or two and building a business unit around them. Board approved, they go off to execute... years later they realized their 10-slide deck was dumb, their understanding the market was flawed, and their product misaligned. This is par for the course for GE over the last decade plus.
shadowtree 8y ago
This was clear from the beginning. I've had team members quit a few years ago to join GE Digital, lured by crazy salaries. Too good to be true. For GE, this was a spreadsheet initiative. Some SVP added a few lines to spreadsheet, opening headcount for a few thousand people. Same SVP would lose interest a few years down and would simply delete those lines again. Nothing more to it, this is corporate 101 on this level (see Siemens, HP, others for the same stuff). Sucks for people that adjusted their lifestyles to those salaries, but it was clear, from the beginning. Hiring a ton of mediocre talent with top pay always mean trouble.
gjvc 8y ago
"Even more challenging, true digital transformation will almost always fail if executed from within the organization. Why? Because the change is so disruptive that the existing organization chokes it off."
Bluestrike2 8y ago
> Even more challenging, true digital transformation will almost always fail if executed from within the organization. Why? Because the change is so disruptive that the existing organization chokes it off. Though I've never worked on these sorts of enterprise transformation projects (at least not at this scale), it's pretty interesting how the internal dynamics/politics can affect them and cause most of them to fail. Normally, my takeaway is that you can learn a lot more from failed projects. But this sort of project ends in failure so often, I think the reverse is actually true (for once). Consider the (resoundingly) successful example of Disney's Next Generation Experience (NGE) project team, which developed what was eventually known as MyMagic+ at Walt Disney World.[0][1] They were basically given carte blanche to interrogate every aspect of the vacation experience to reinvent it, settling on using RFID-equipped "MagicBands" that would replace tickets, photo cards, credit cards, etc. There wasn't an aspect of the vacation experience, or a department within the Parks division, that wouldn't have been radically changed by NGE. When the board approved the $1bn project, Bob Iger told the executive in charge of it "this better work." There was infighting, turf wars, and everything else; it's not that people wanted it to fail, but everyone had their own idea of how to define success. And yet, despite everything, it succeeded beyond even Disney's collective imagination. These projects might be damned infuriating when you're working on them, but they're fascinating to read about from afar. 0. https://www.fastcompany.com/3044283/the-messy-business-of-reinventing-happiness https://www.fastcompany.com/3044283/the-messy-business-of-re... 1. https://www.wired.com/2015/03/disney-magicband/ https://www.wired.com/2015/03/disney-magicband/
purplezooey 8y ago
True digital transformation is about rethinking your current business model for the 21st century. The process is not just about adding technology to the existing model. Wtf does that even mean.

104 points by theomega 8y ago

As a customer of GE software products, I've seen their core products falter a bit while they attempted to prop up the Predix platform. Maybe it will be a breath of fresh air when/ if they sell Predix, hoping that they will focus more on their core products. It is difficult to sell a platform to industrial customers, as many of the ideas are too abstract to understand what it can do for you and how much money it will make for you.

ovi256 8y ago
This could very well be an electricity like situation. If you have a factory moving on a pre-electricity prime-mover (probably a coal engine) and distribution system (probably axes and belts everywhere) and some one comes and pitches you electricity, you don't see the advantages. You see the costs of putting electric motors in all your machines, hiring all these expensive electric engineers and technicians, and basically rebuilding your factory for electricity. I see a similar dilemma here. Most industrial units will have to be rebuilt to take advantage of industrial IoT.
- karmicthreat 8y ago
  Its not quite that bad. You can have a plant edge device that pulls information out of your plant PLCs. Maybe without code changes on the PLC. This data can then go into an analytics platform for whatever reporting you want. The problem is nobody sees much value in the reporting.
  - laythea 8y ago
    I work in the industry and would agree. Also, nobody has software intelligent enough to extract the value out of the data. Maybe one day.

ovi256 8y ago

Are there any succesful examples of digital transformation ? I know digital transformation is the thing to do if you're in strategy or management consulting, so I hope to get some input from practitioners, or anyone who witnessed one. Derisively, my impression is that an organisation like GE will have to go through garbage collection while one (or why not more) digital native organisations take its place, in order for the new organisation to be a digital native. But I have no idea if being a digital native is even necessary. Most GE business units seem to be doing just fine with their accumulated capital of all kinds and their economies of scale.

StreamBright 8y ago
Are you kidding? There are hundreds of successful digital transformation stories.
- drewhart75 8y ago
  Can you list a handful of the hundreds?
  - tootie 8y ago
    The entirety of Wall St has gone digital and some of those banks are 100 years old. Walmart is another good example.
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    10: https://www.cio.com/article/3149977/digital-transformation/digital-transformation-examples.html https://www.cio.com/article/3149977/digital-transformation/d... 12: https://www.brainbridge.be/news/top-12-real-world-digital-transformation-success-stories https://www.brainbridge.be/news/top-12-real-world-digital-tr... I am quite amazed the closed mindedness of some of the people commenting here
virusduck 8y ago
While not really the same, how about HBO? I think HBO is a stunning example, as they were an early leader in (invented?) a dedicated movie-delivery method. I'd argue that their original lifeblood (cable movie channel) is largely dead, but yet they flourish. A large part is because they embraced the digital world, knowing that they had to create something worth paying for. The take away I see is that "digital transformation" is more than going online or providing services, you still have to have something that people actually want to buy.

le-mark 8y ago

Yet at the same time, GE Digital was given a P&L and had to make quarterly commitments on performance. The revenue was tied to the work it was doing with internal GE business units and one-off partnerships with outside software companies. So when Predix integrated with a new partner, the focus was usually on generating short-term revenue and not long-term value to GE's end customers. Short term profit seeking is a cancer upon us all, is there no way out of this hell?

acjohnson55 8y ago
Venture capital?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Out of the frying pan, into the fire. You'll be trading the focus on reasonable but short-term returns for a focus on 10x mid-time returns.
- sgt101 8y ago
  Worked for Twitter! oh...
toomuchtodo 8y ago
> Short term profit seeking is a cancer upon us all, is there no way out of this hell? Take your firm private with investors that are focused on long term goals, not short term profits. Why bother with public markets if private markets provide sufficient capital to execute?
- sah2ed 8y ago
  Private markets is also the route that Elon Musk is considering with Tesla, similar to how SpaceX is structured where employees and sophisticated investors can sell shares every six months [0]. This will also solve his constant antagonism towards short sellers. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/how-elon-musk-s-spacex-may-be-a-road-map-for-tesla-going-private https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/how-elon-...

jdhn 8y ago

As someone who worked for a branch of GE, I'm surprised it took this long for people to realize that it wasn't all sunshine and roses. This is the key quote in the article for me: >Then, one year later, in 2014, GE released a press release that said it was generating more than $1 billion in revenue from productivity solutions, highlighting Predix. Like the article says, the vast majority of this $1 billion came from counting the revenue from any product that utilized Predix/GE Digital resources, no matter how much they contributed. I also never heard of any outside company that utilized GE Digital resources, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen.

throwawayge 8y ago

As a GE SW developer, I could chime in. Regarding digital transformation, this should not come as surprise but there is an incredible tension and misalignment between a GE core pushing for a platform and different businesses. The issue is that businesses have roadmaps where they need to release new products each year, and it does not take into account having to rewrite everything or huge part from scratch to get some longer term platform benefits. So in the end the adoption is an issue. I joined GE just before Predix introduction, and no one in my business rushed to adopt it. As a matter of fact, now that GE digital is going to be divested, that was likely the smart move. Moreover, the product I am working on, is based on the "GE platform" effort of a few years prior. Platform that has no longer any official support (the maintenance team is one guy somewhere in the world) and that has re fragmented in every different product it was used in. The lack of support is not really an issue because the framework has been battle tested but on the other hand, there is no obvious benefits coming from having an "almost-common" core between applications or devices. So as business it makes you wary to adopt the last idea coming from GE digital or GE central, event it makes absolute sense on paper, because you have no idea how long they will commit to that idea. This is really a chicken-egg problem, because no one wants to use a zombie platform, and no one wants to spend support on a platform no one uses. Maybe on a more positive note, even if I have not seen much direct impact on GE digital products, GE SW culture has changed. When I joined, SW was kinda neglected, more seen as a liability than anything, and now at last we have moved to more modern tools with CI pipelines, focus on devops and so on. But this is more like a grassroots effort. But I don't feel anymore that we are using a sw stack and tools totally outdated.

le-mark 8y ago
How's the culture? Are devs actually busy and productive or is the the typical never ending wait for requirements to materialize that's so common at moribund large enterprises?
- throwawayge 8y ago
  I certainly cannot speak for all teams, but most teams are fairly autonomous as long as they deliver. Like any big company, there are lots of stakeholders so that means that final decisions, for example a feature being in or out of scope, can take an unnecessary long time, but it does not mean you are stuck waiting. There are always lots of things to implement, refactor or improve that do not require a seal of approval.

nimbius 8y ago

>GE was going to own the industrial internet. I have a friend that works in mechanical maintenance. Heck, i used to work for him while i was putting myself through automotive trade school. Mitsui, Mitutoyo, Kuka, and Motoman not to mention Fanuc are all household names for industry automation based on a well defined platform of experience dragging back more than 30 years. Hell, even mitsubishi controllers are massively more invested in tooling and automation than GE ever could be. And, they listen to customers...theyre open by default. I can plug motor control data and Fanuc probe logic systems into my Infinity QS SPC software and get accurate runout and ID/OD grind data in REAL TIME. no licenses required because in machining or component part shops that are large enough, its more important to meet JIT deadlines than it is to pay licenses (they get paid after the fact, and vendors are happy to subscribe to this model.) The only GE stuff we used was in the substation transformers used by the building to feed power to the cymbal cutters and CNC systems in the shop. never networked, because it didnt have to be.

fermienrico 8y ago
Having worked on Fanuc robots for more than 2 years, I can attest that it is an extremely closed system. Want more registers for variables on your robot program? Shell out $10k. EVERYTHING is closed and proprietary; once you go Fanuc, you as a customer is doomed for paying them whatever they ask because the ROI of switching is more than paying them for insane things like controller registers. Don't even think about ANY open source components or anything of the sort found in the software industry.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  This is definitely true of Fanuc, but not a lot else. Even the fiber interconnects are open protocols (regardless of how often implemented they are). At the low end, you have modbus for everything (yes, it sucks latency wise even over tcp, yes, people can't number crap reasonably, etc. It works in the end). Ethernet/IP is not a bad step up (I use it with 0 rockwell components). All my VFD's can be controlled with the same PLC code because of OVDA standards. Ethercat is also fairly nice (and higher end CNC machines often just have everything from I/O to servo's on a single ethercat bus). It's more complicated, but i expect that will change over time. Right now I have no problems connecting my siemens, mitsubishi, etc servos, field i/o, pneumatic valves, etc together over Ethernet/IP. Even lower end PLC's from automationdirect support it just fine. (I've done Ethercat a few times as well, it's just harder to deal with on the software side ATM unless you go with beckhoff stuff)

PaulHoule 8y ago

For me the television ads were a "bad smell", just as they were for IBM Watson. Somebody should start an ETF which disinvests in B2B companies that run bullshit ads.

SlightRespect 8y ago
Yeah, I never understood who those ads were aimed at. Buying a superbowl ad for a bunch of money to hit millions of consumers in hopes of a single CEO with buy authority watching the ad?
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  For one thing it keeps the media sweet. For all those years in which the Archer Daniels Midland corporation ran ads on Sunday morning political talk shows, ADM got to scam the government and consumers for billions thanks to subsidies they were able to get.
- ralphc 8y ago
  My guess is they're for the thousands of people who could potentially invest in the company.
icedchai 8y ago
Those GE ads were hysterical (are? I don't watch much TV anymore...)
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Their current one plays the women in STEM fiddle in much the same way. It actually has some social merit if you disregard the reality of working for GE.
gwbas1c 8y ago
After seeing a few of the ads, I went and looked at their HR website to see what kind of jobs they had open. Their HR website was all flash, around the time when it was obvious to any competent engineer that flash was going the way the dodo. It also didn't work. (It was one of those websites where someone spent a lot of time concentrating on graphics but didn't really know how to get it to work.) "Bad smell" was an understatement.

sgt101 8y ago

"Digital transformation initiatives don't need thousands of people. They need a small team with very little time and very little money." Ok, think this through. Big businesses have money. They can create small teams easily. Creating a short term team with not much money is in the power of every company in the fortune 500, heck, it's in the power of the top 10,000 companies... And yet we do not see these teams doing these transformations. Shure we see teams creating "friendly digital employee pals" and "Machine learning driven employee survey feedback tools" but what we do not see is small, underfunded teams rapidly changing the face of business. Because... it's hard. In reality, although executives love the message "small team, no money, fast" the translation that they should be using is "a way of wasting a bit of money and time doing something that will definitely fail"

ncheek 8y ago
In addition to it being hard to rapidly change the face of business, these teams can be doomed to failure by virtue of the restrictive environment that they exist in - for example having to work within the sprawling policies of the business. I had an opportunity to work in a small digital transformation project at one of these "big businesses". When they had me come in every day and do basically nothing for 2 weeks before they could check all the boxes to ship me an engineering computer, I got the first big glimpse of how big business bureaucracy can doom these sorts of lean teams to failure.

kulu2002 8y ago

This article gives some really good points to be considered by organisation planning to ride on wave of 'Digital Transformation'

_coveredInBees 8y ago

That GE Digital failed, is no surprise to folks like me who worked (left there a couple of years back just before things got especially bad with layoffs) at GE's R&D labs and were always skeptical of the flashy sales pitch surrounding GE Digital/Industrial Internet with very little to back it up. When I tried to look into playing with Predix and utilizing it on GE projects I was working on, it boggled my mind that they wanted to charge me, a GE employee, money to use Predix on projects for GE. That of course meant that internal adoption of Predix was negligible unless mandated by higher ups, and if your own company isn't going to adopt and improve the product, I sure as hell don't see why anyone external to GE would. Apart from that, GE Digital was a fundamentally mismanaged effort. The people in charge seemed more interested in talking the talk rather than walking the walk. Most people at San Ramon seemed very disillusioned and their frustrations were out in the open during any of the company-wide all-hands meetings with a Q&A component.

philipodonnell 8y ago
> it boggled my mind that they wanted to charge me, a GE employee, money to use Predix on projects for GE. This is common in very large companies because an easy way to justify a new business unit it to claim it will pay for itself by charging other business units as well as external customers.
- _coveredInBees 8y ago
  Oh yes, I understand that, but as the article points out, focusing on this short-term revenue metric is such a flawed approach to something like the GE Digital / Predix concept since it was a completely new product that desperately needed widespread adoption to be successful. You can't "transform" an industrial company into one that is at the forefront of software / "digital" with that approach. At least if they let their own teams / businesses use it with minimal friction, they'd have a much better shot at someone coming up with good applications for their product that they could potentially sell externally.

vinceguidry 8y ago

Shortsightedness in American business never fails to amaze me. You would think that a company as old as GE would be able to recognize the difference between capex and opex, but these sorts of missteps still seem absurdly common. Even GE still struggles to understand software. It gives me hope that software engineers will become the next class of power players and the whole thing isn't going to get subsumed into finance like everything else. Even Apple is falling prey these days to finance-thinking.

twunde 8y ago
GE has really taken a significant step down under Jeff Immelt's tenure (how much is his fault is up for question). It certainly is no longer the place to go for managerial excellence. The people that are good, leave. The managerial rotation system leads to managers that make decisions for the short-term. The decisions just need to be good enough for the manager to get a promotion and then it's someone else's problem. Other issues have been being late and a dollar short to most things, requiring GE to spend $$$$ to be a late entry. Source: Multiple family members have worked for GE
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Welch turned the company into an agglomeration of warring fiefdoms. They are doomed to consume themselves. He got out because he knew the mess he created was unfixable.

option_greek 8y ago

I work in a conglomerate that is in the middle of digital transformation. The problems we see are exactly the same as stated in the article: 1) Incumbent IT/Dev teams eating millions of dollars creating roadblocks every where for the newer teams 2) Expected to bill the newer platforms to existing business divisions 3) Red-tape and bureaucracy all over the place - Loads of approvals needed to do something simple like setting up dev environments 4) Top down planning for 'transformation'. No inputs are ever sought from new teams on anything To sum it up -> doomed before even starting

ptero 8y ago
It is a universal phenomenon -- large incumbent teams will fight to entrench systems even as they are failing. With senior leadership help firewall and replace can work. That is, firewall support for existing systems to old team and make new team build new setup. But it is really hard -- old guard will fight to kill new process after every mistake and new teams will try to kill existing systems prematurely.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Especially when the old team is obviously going to be fired if the new team works.
  - ptero 8y ago
    It does not have to be this way. The fact that new system is developed by a brand new team is because the old team has dug in and would not support moving to the new technology. But even when the old system is decommissioned there is no need to fire the old team. It does happen, but because everyone who is capable of finding a new project moved there and whoever is left cannot or doesn't want to do anything else.

cashsterling 8y ago

I had the sense that GE didn't know what they were doing withe Predix and their whole industrial internet strategy. It seemed like some executive went to a 'innovation conference' and drank the kool-aid about industry 4.0 and IoT... came back to the office, slapped a 10-slide deck together for the board of directors framing a strategy to take over market space built around acquiring a promising company or two and building a business unit around them. Board approved, they go off to execute... years later they realized their 10-slide deck was dumb, their understanding the market was flawed, and their product misaligned. This is par for the course for GE over the last decade plus.

shadowtree 8y ago

This was clear from the beginning. I've had team members quit a few years ago to join GE Digital, lured by crazy salaries. Too good to be true. For GE, this was a spreadsheet initiative. Some SVP added a few lines to spreadsheet, opening headcount for a few thousand people. Same SVP would lose interest a few years down and would simply delete those lines again. Nothing more to it, this is corporate 101 on this level (see Siemens, HP, others for the same stuff). Sucks for people that adjusted their lifestyles to those salaries, but it was clear, from the beginning. Hiring a ton of mediocre talent with top pay always mean trouble.

gjvc 8y ago

"Even more challenging, true digital transformation will almost always fail if executed from within the organization. Why? Because the change is so disruptive that the existing organization chokes it off."

Bluestrike2 8y ago

> Even more challenging, true digital transformation will almost always fail if executed from within the organization. Why? Because the change is so disruptive that the existing organization chokes it off. Though I've never worked on these sorts of enterprise transformation projects (at least not at this scale), it's pretty interesting how the internal dynamics/politics can affect them and cause most of them to fail. Normally, my takeaway is that you can learn a lot more from failed projects. But this sort of project ends in failure so often, I think the reverse is actually true (for once). Consider the (resoundingly) successful example of Disney's Next Generation Experience (NGE) project team, which developed what was eventually known as MyMagic+ at Walt Disney World.[0][1] They were basically given carte blanche to interrogate every aspect of the vacation experience to reinvent it, settling on using RFID-equipped "MagicBands" that would replace tickets, photo cards, credit cards, etc. There wasn't an aspect of the vacation experience, or a department within the Parks division, that wouldn't have been radically changed by NGE. When the board approved the $1bn project, Bob Iger told the executive in charge of it "this better work." There was infighting, turf wars, and everything else; it's not that people wanted it to fail, but everyone had their own idea of how to define success. And yet, despite everything, it succeeded beyond even Disney's collective imagination. These projects might be damned infuriating when you're working on them, but they're fascinating to read about from afar. 0. https://www.fastcompany.com/3044283/the-messy-business-of-reinventing-happiness https://www.fastcompany.com/3044283/the-messy-business-of-re... 1. https://www.wired.com/2015/03/disney-magicband/ https://www.wired.com/2015/03/disney-magicband/

purplezooey 8y ago

True digital transformation is about rethinking your current business model for the 21st century. The process is not just about adding technology to the existing model. Wtf does that even mean.