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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'

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.

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.