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A fun read, but a reductive and somewhat cliched thesis. Software companies don't die because they let the marketers take the reins. By the time that even happe

A fun read, but a reductive and somewhat cliched thesis. Software companies don't die because they let the marketers take the reins. By the time that even happens, the disease has already set in. The influx of suits is a symptom and not a cause. Usually it's a symptom of one or more things: 1) The company has grown complacent; 2) The company has lost touch with its userbase, or with the landscape in general, or with the competition; 3) The company has reached its liquidity event, at which point it's no longer "cool," and cannot attract or retain top talent; 4) A bad investor, founder, or partner took control and started making poor decisions, or a great one ceded control and left; 5) The category is disrupted entirely. There are many more root causes, but you get the idea. The suits don't actually kill the company; they are just correlated with the death.

mweatherill 16y ago
I would love to read more articles about how mature companies are reinvigorated and revived. It is easy to point the finger at what went wrong and why companies often aren't sustainable but what about the counter-examples that we can really learn from?
- jonnathanson 16y ago
  True. Or companies that came back from the total brink (Apple, most famously, but also IBM, to some extent HP, and others). What's interesting to me is that you rarely hear about software companies that come back from near-irrelevance after a prolonged bout with it. I'm sure there are some obvious examples I'm not thinking of right now. In some respects you could almost even make the argument for Microsoft, assuming its E&D business continues to flourish and become more important to the company overall.
Figs 16y ago
It may be cliché now, but was it cliché in 1995 (when it appears it was written)?
- jonnathanson 16y ago
  I would still argue yes. As a rule, a software company that knows what it's doing doesn't allow marketers to take control of development in the way the article describes. Ergo, by the time the marketers are invited into the "hive," the company is already in a bad state because it is the sort of company that now makes such decisions and puts such structures in place. Furthermore, clueless marketing types don't even learn about most hot software companies when they're still hot. They only even discover the company after it's already old news or has become mainstream. If anything, this was more true 15 years ago than it is today. The article confuses cause and effect. It's not that the suits can't still do a lot of damage, because they can and they do. But they are not the driving factor behind a company's decline. They are symptoms thereof.

mweatherill 16y ago

I would love to read more articles about how mature companies are reinvigorated and revived. It is easy to point the finger at what went wrong and why companies often aren't sustainable but what about the counter-examples that we can really learn from?

jonnathanson 16y ago
True. Or companies that came back from the total brink (Apple, most famously, but also IBM, to some extent HP, and others). What's interesting to me is that you rarely hear about software companies that come back from near-irrelevance after a prolonged bout with it. I'm sure there are some obvious examples I'm not thinking of right now. In some respects you could almost even make the argument for Microsoft, assuming its E&D business continues to flourish and become more important to the company overall.

Figs 16y ago

It may be cliché now, but was it cliché in 1995 (when it appears it was written)?

jonnathanson 16y ago
I would still argue yes. As a rule, a software company that knows what it's doing doesn't allow marketers to take control of development in the way the article describes. Ergo, by the time the marketers are invited into the "hive," the company is already in a bad state because it is the sort of company that now makes such decisions and puts such structures in place. Furthermore, clueless marketing types don't even learn about most hot software companies when they're still hot. They only even discover the company after it's already old news or has become mainstream. If anything, this was more true 15 years ago than it is today. The article confuses cause and effect. It's not that the suits can't still do a lot of damage, because they can and they do. But they are not the driving factor behind a company's decline. They are symptoms thereof.