9 ms·

I helped reposition a database product that went on to make $1B in revenue

309 points by saadalem 6y ago

tigerstripe 6y ago
I searched online - seems that when SAP bought Sybase, net revenues of Sybase were around $1b - this was only one product in their portfolio. Is it true that the product was making $1b / year?
- dharmab 6y ago
  I read it as it could have been making $1b at some point after the SAP acquisition.
  - eloff 6y ago
    She mentioned it really took off after the SAP acquisition. So it's possible.
    - bigbizisverywyz 6y ago
      Sybase was really dying on the vine probably at that point, so SAP buying them gave the product a better chance of actually being developed and not abandoned, so that probably helped a lot to boost sales and support contracts. I remember where I work, the product went from 'divest' to 'retain' following the acquisition.
- jcampbell1 6y ago
  It looks like the product was conceived in 1992, Watcom was first acquired in 1994 by Powersoft, which was bought by Sybase in 1995. SAP bought Sybase in 2010. I'd bet the product has seen significant growth in the mobile / IoT era. Applications that work offline and synchronizes later are a pain to build. Seems like the kind of infrastructure that exists in every police car these days.
  - teleforce 6y ago
    Despite the promise of Starlink of pervasive internet connection, there are always blind spots where connection just do not exist or just pain intermittent. Personally I think the future of desktop applications should be designed around the premise of localhost first and cloud second. The ability of the locally host application to synchronize to the cloud or central repository (similar to rsync and Git) should be the default not the other way around (I am looking at you Microsoft Teams). Technically there should be no different between people working independently with their local copy of data to be merged centrally later, and an offline application with an intermittent internet connection. Now with readily available VPN tools like Wireguard becoming more popular the notion of using web applications for distributed authoring and collaboration, etc, is not necessary anymore. But if you insist to use web based technology there is always protocol like webdav to the rescue. If you do not want either of them (VPN and webdav), the recently announced SMB over QUIC can be a very good alternative solution [1]. [1]https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-over-quic-to-windows.aspx https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-ove...
andygcook 6y ago
April Dunford's book, Obviously Awesome, is very good and worth reading if you're a founder or marketer (or both.) We reverse engineered her workshop and did it as a team at the end of last year for my startup. Was very much worth the day.
- masonhensley 6y ago
  Second the recommendation. Came across her on twitter last week, found the book & listened to most of it over the Memorial day weekend via an audiobook.
- kristianc 6y ago
  Second this - it’s a great book, and one of the few truly actionable guides to doing positioning (a lot of them get pretty academic). Accessible to founders, and helps lay out the art and science of positioning, and give a methodology for actually doing it. Would recommend it also to technical people who are sceptical of marketing in general.
  - richsherwood 6y ago
    Do you have any similar books that you would recommend? I am always looking for good marketing books but these days it's all some guru trying to sell their book so hard to identify the solid through the noise.
    - gk1 6y ago
      Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, and Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam.
    - strongai 6y ago
      'Positioning' by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Where it all started.
    - danmaz74 6y ago
      Killer brands by Frank Lane. Best book I read about branding.
haltingproblem 6y ago
tl;dr version - Desktop DB product. She called customers, found most were not using, one was and was crazy about the product. Product "repositioned" around that use case. End of story. I am sure there is a lot more to Dunford's book that this article reveals but IMHO product positioning is the wrong takeaway. Product positioning, which sounds management consultancy speak like "product strategy" is top-down. Implies near perfect knowledge of the marketplace, customer use cases, existing alternatives..... Anti-thetical, if not opposite, to the Lean Startup method. Lean implies you have incomplete information but you map out the profitable niches by experimentation. You want to build that which is needed, not build and position it later. Recommend Robert Fitzpatrick's Mom test instead. http://momtestbook.com/ http://momtestbook.com/. He also has an youtube channel.
nojito 6y ago
survivorship bias in full swing here. Can't find any followup successes after this product repositioning
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  Yes, more like narrative fallacy akin to sayin that one feature we added to a product was responsible for its success.
ponker 6y ago
Positioning is something where overnight you can turn a stinker into a hit, or the reverse. The initial iPod is the Michael Jordan of this, but I myself repositioned a product and its sales went up by $100m. It was being sold as the most feature rich phone with a long list of features. I discarded all of the marketing except those around the music features and ran an advertising campaign just around music.
gk1 6y ago
Agh. April is terrific, and I agree that the right messaging and positioning can have disproportionately high impacts on revenue (speaking from experience with Netlify, Gravitational, and others), but this click-bait title is a huge disservice to April, other marketers, and founders who may be dissuaded from trying new messaging and positioning. The actual story is that the person (April) was asked by a manager to interview a bunch of customers. When they brought back the data, the manager (or the team, collectively) acted on it by coming up with new product positioning. Some years later, after countless product iterations and three acquisitions, the product landed at a tech giant that does $30B/year. The author speculates it was then responsible for $1B in revenue, though doesn't know for sure. So... It's fair to say "I was there early and it was neat to solve these problems for a DB that later ended up at SAP." But to imply that your work directly resulted to $1B in revenue--as this title does--is just nonsense. What the F*ck were the editors thinking.
- whack 6y ago
  Why so angry. The title reads: > How I helped reposition a database product that went on to make $1 billion in revenue It doesn't say "How I single handedly repositioned" or even "How I repositioned". The author literally helped in the process that led to repositioning. By uncovering a key use-case for the product, which then became the key feature and selling point of the updated product. And regarding the comment about $1B in revenue, is there any good reason not to give her the benefit of the doubt? She literally worked with the team and rubbed shoulders with them every day. A lot of non-public numbers get talked about casually at the water cooler. There seems to be a trend where people are hyper-obsessed with nitpicking titles and calling out "clickbait". In this case, the article title is a pretty great representation of the article's contents - or at least as great as you can get in one sentence. I personally enjoyed the article, and was hoping to read a discussion about the main points raised in the article, or similar stories others may have. Instead, the top comment is an angry rant nitpicking the article's title.
  - OnlyOnes20 6y ago
    Could not agree more. Thanks for posting your positive response.
abiogenesis 6y ago
> And we had almost killed the product! Well, one could argue that you killed the product. You just reused the source code for a new product. A product is much more than the software.
wyck 6y ago
This happened at the first start-up I worked at, 3 years in and almost bankrupt, one large customer kept using the product for a different reason ( kinda hacking it all together), so we completely pivoted to survive with this customers needs and it became a huge success. That pivot was towards such a niche market that no one was really in the space, and no one outside it would have really even know about it.
- achow 6y ago
  Can you please give a link to the product page - assuming that you commercialized it for others as well.
  - wyck 6y ago
    No sorry, but I can tell you it provides video/text/meta data archiving for many countries' parliaments and state legislatures.
astroalex 6y ago
Completely unrelated to the content of the article, but I find it so annoying when interview responses are rendered in italics. For contrast, here's a nicely typeset interview from the NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/25/magazine/hannah-gadsby-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/25/magazine/hann...
- huangc10 6y ago
  Not sure why you're downvoted. I completely agree. I couldn't get past the first answer because of the italics. Why would someone do that. I'm sure it's an interesting Q&A, but I just can't read it.
- laegooose 6y ago
  Totally agree. Italics are hard to read. Main text must be in regular font.
ykevinator 6y ago
This is stupid
willart4food 6y ago
It was the year 1999, remember that? I was working at a startup and we were preparing to IPO. I got a cold call from a - I kid you not - "Color Consultant"; I don't know why but I listened to her instead of hanging up, her spiel was: "Do you know [Inser name of recent IPO]? Well they hired me and I changed the color of their corporate identity from Black on Green to Green on Black; well 4 months later they IPO's raising $250 million at a $1+ billion-dollar valuation". WUT? Her implication was that she was taking credit for the successful IPO. So, there it is. I am not saying that April's contribution was not useful, but... everything in a long process is useful, but not 1 single contribution is responsible for the entire (or majority) of success. Except for grit!
- pkaye 6y ago
  This reminds me of an early job. It was my first job as a mechanical engineer. I was lucky enough to work in a R&D team on an entirely new product line. Crazy but rewarding work from months on end. Near completion, I was moved to a side team to help out with other smaller projects. At this point the marketing guy comes in to decide on the name and color of the machine. So they bring in the consultants and in the end decided to stay with the name the engineers gave it and the same color as older machines (beige and black.) And the kicker was at the launch party they forget to invite me but invited the marketing guy who spent a couple days helping out. What a punch in the guts it was.
  - abraae 6y ago
    I've been in more than one meeting where, after lengthy discussion about product name, the group circled again back to the original (temporary) name created by the developers. And in that time it had somehow subtly become adopted by marketing as theirs :) (To be fair, picking names is hard, even if you are in marketing. I'm sure there's plenty of science, but one of the best ways IMO is to just blather them all around for a while and see what feels right/sticks after a day or two).
- hnick 6y ago
  Imagine if they didn't change the colours and got a $2 billion dollar valuation! Ever since learning about opportunity cost it has infected my mind with cynicism.
redis_mlc 6y ago
I'm going to give a lot of credit to April for this, and say the title is not click-bait. Long before sqlite, or CouchBase, there was SQL Anywhere. And SQL Anywhere had something in the 90's that's still rare even today - hands-off built-in production-ready replication. (MySQL struggled for a decade to ship reliable replication after Yahoo paid them $40k for the original statement-based replication, and Postgres still doesn't have a great story out of the box.) It's that multi-source production-ready replication that April shone a spotlight on that made Sybase worth $5.8 billion when it was sold to SAP. https://www.zdnet.com/article/sap-acquires-sybase-for-5-8-billion-but-why/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sap-acquires-sybase-for-5-8-bi... So kudos to April for finding a huge diamond in the rough. I've been to lectures on SQL Anywhere, but I hope some day to use it in a project. It's a killer embedded database. Source: DBA.
- icedchai 6y ago
  I worked on some systems in the 90's that used Sybase SQL Server (AKA Adaptive Server Enterprise, not the Anywhere version.) Maybe "Anywhere" is okay, but you'd be laughed at if you suggested using Sybase SQL for a project these days. It's legacy tech.
  - projektfu 6y ago
    SQL Anywhere is also legacy tech, but so is MySQL 5.x and lots of other established stuff. Sybase SQL Server was a real contender for a long time and IIRC shares a lineage with Microsoft SQL Server. All the major SQL vendors maintain a huge legacy of design dead ends that they have to continue supporting because applications were built when they were the next big thing. I used this software in its prime back in ‘97 and it was quite clever. It had none of the problems of its main competitor, Microsoft Jet (Access). MSDE was still a few years away. Plus, it was cross platform, so us Microsoft haters could get behind it, even if we felt forced to develop for the MS platform.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > Sybase SQL for a project these days. It's legacy tech. 1) SQL Anywhere is not "Sybase SQL." Different products, with SQL Anywhere being an embedded database that can run on a smartphone and replicate bidirectionally to other masters. Not many alternatives, even in 2020. 2) Legacy tech - when you care about your data, accept nothing less. Fun fact: the #1 most popular and regarded RDBMS for the past few years is considered to be MySQL, and it was the key technology that powered both Web 1.0 and 2.0. If that's legacy, I want more legacy. Source: DBA.
dblohm7 6y ago
I did my first internship working at Sybase on SQL Anywhere. Some great people worked at that office. Even some of the original Watcom guys were still there. Fun fact: SQL Anywhere was still compiled using Watcom C++ long after the latter was discontinued as a commercial product. Most of the people who worked on the compiler still worked there, so they maintained it internally until SQL Anywhere finally switched over to MSVC.
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  > MSVC I thought it ran on multiple operating systems
  - dblohm7 6y ago
    It does. I'm referring to the Windows builds.
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  SQL Anywhere was wonderful, but Watcom C++ was horrible! When Sybase bought SQL Anywhere the compiler came along with it, hence was adopted as the in-house standard. As I recall the debugger would fail regularly due to pointer bugs corrupting the debugger itself. That's exactly when you would like the debugger to stick around... ;-)
listenallyall 6y ago
This is a strange story. Did the company really believe there was a large market of people who "had to manipulate some data and write structured queries, but you didn't want to do it in Excel"? What was the actual incentive or opportunity that the product was meant to fill? Did anyone acknowledge the popularity of dBase, FoxPro, FileMaker (with Access coming soon)? What was the product failing to do for the 90% of customers who bought it then abandoned it, surely some common themes must have arisen via all her cold calls -- and why didn't they address those issues? On the other hand, Oracle compatibility and sync surely weren't trivial to build, how were these features not already a major part of the marketing strategy?
suyash 6y ago
Click Bait Alert
andai 6y ago
To read the article normally, open the web inspector and add em { font-style: normal; }
blunte 6y ago
Lesson: know your customers and their needs.
sankalp221 6y ago
Please add RSS to the site. Would've loved to subscribe via my Feedly reader.
- nstart 6y ago
  They do have RSS. Unfortunately it's truncated at /interviews/rss.xml
yuvalr1 6y ago
I think that the talk here about taking the credit for the 1 billion is missing the point. What I think she wanted to emphasize is that they almost shut down a product that made more than 1 billion, and that she took part in the process that saved it.
- Traster 6y ago
  I think a lot of the discussion in here is about how whoever wrote the title managed to destroy any chance of this interview getting any meaningful discussion. Which I think is appropriate, because it's a blog about marketing that manages to market their blog about marketing with the kind of deftness I expect from my 8 year old daughter's rendition of Let it go.
hodgesrm 6y ago
SQL Anywhere was an amazing product. What's left out in the article is that it was also really fast. I had an assignment in 1998 to benchmark it against another pocket database. SQL Anywhere was 100x faster. On the Excel throughput graphs I had to use right and left Y axes for each product. Otherwise product #2 was just a flat line on the X axis. ;-)

309 points by saadalem 6y ago

I searched online - seems that when SAP bought Sybase, net revenues of Sybase were around $1b - this was only one product in their portfolio. Is it true that the product was making $1b / year?

dharmab 6y ago
I read it as it could have been making $1b at some point after the SAP acquisition.
- eloff 6y ago
  She mentioned it really took off after the SAP acquisition. So it's possible.
  - bigbizisverywyz 6y ago
    Sybase was really dying on the vine probably at that point, so SAP buying them gave the product a better chance of actually being developed and not abandoned, so that probably helped a lot to boost sales and support contracts. I remember where I work, the product went from 'divest' to 'retain' following the acquisition.
jcampbell1 6y ago
It looks like the product was conceived in 1992, Watcom was first acquired in 1994 by Powersoft, which was bought by Sybase in 1995. SAP bought Sybase in 2010. I'd bet the product has seen significant growth in the mobile / IoT era. Applications that work offline and synchronizes later are a pain to build. Seems like the kind of infrastructure that exists in every police car these days.
- teleforce 6y ago
  Despite the promise of Starlink of pervasive internet connection, there are always blind spots where connection just do not exist or just pain intermittent. Personally I think the future of desktop applications should be designed around the premise of localhost first and cloud second. The ability of the locally host application to synchronize to the cloud or central repository (similar to rsync and Git) should be the default not the other way around (I am looking at you Microsoft Teams). Technically there should be no different between people working independently with their local copy of data to be merged centrally later, and an offline application with an intermittent internet connection. Now with readily available VPN tools like Wireguard becoming more popular the notion of using web applications for distributed authoring and collaboration, etc, is not necessary anymore. But if you insist to use web based technology there is always protocol like webdav to the rescue. If you do not want either of them (VPN and webdav), the recently announced SMB over QUIC can be a very good alternative solution [1]. [1]https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-over-quic-to-windows.aspx https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-ove...

andygcook 6y ago

April Dunford's book, Obviously Awesome, is very good and worth reading if you're a founder or marketer (or both.) We reverse engineered her workshop and did it as a team at the end of last year for my startup. Was very much worth the day.

masonhensley 6y ago
Second the recommendation. Came across her on twitter last week, found the book & listened to most of it over the Memorial day weekend via an audiobook.
kristianc 6y ago
Second this - it’s a great book, and one of the few truly actionable guides to doing positioning (a lot of them get pretty academic). Accessible to founders, and helps lay out the art and science of positioning, and give a methodology for actually doing it. Would recommend it also to technical people who are sceptical of marketing in general.
- richsherwood 6y ago
  Do you have any similar books that you would recommend? I am always looking for good marketing books but these days it's all some guru trying to sell their book so hard to identify the solid through the noise.
  - gk1 6y ago
    Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, and Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam.
  - strongai 6y ago
    'Positioning' by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Where it all started.
  - danmaz74 6y ago
    Killer brands by Frank Lane. Best book I read about branding.

haltingproblem 6y ago

tl;dr version - Desktop DB product. She called customers, found most were not using, one was and was crazy about the product. Product "repositioned" around that use case. End of story. I am sure there is a lot more to Dunford's book that this article reveals but IMHO product positioning is the wrong takeaway. Product positioning, which sounds management consultancy speak like "product strategy" is top-down. Implies near perfect knowledge of the marketplace, customer use cases, existing alternatives..... Anti-thetical, if not opposite, to the Lean Startup method. Lean implies you have incomplete information but you map out the profitable niches by experimentation. You want to build that which is needed, not build and position it later. Recommend Robert Fitzpatrick's Mom test instead. http://momtestbook.com/ http://momtestbook.com/. He also has an youtube channel.

nojito 6y ago

survivorship bias in full swing here. Can't find any followup successes after this product repositioning

haltingproblem 6y ago
Yes, more like narrative fallacy akin to sayin that one feature we added to a product was responsible for its success.

ponker 6y ago

Positioning is something where overnight you can turn a stinker into a hit, or the reverse. The initial iPod is the Michael Jordan of this, but I myself repositioned a product and its sales went up by $100m. It was being sold as the most feature rich phone with a long list of features. I discarded all of the marketing except those around the music features and ran an advertising campaign just around music.

gk1 6y ago

Agh. April is terrific, and I agree that the right messaging and positioning can have disproportionately high impacts on revenue (speaking from experience with Netlify, Gravitational, and others), but this click-bait title is a huge disservice to April, other marketers, and founders who may be dissuaded from trying new messaging and positioning. The actual story is that the person (April) was asked by a manager to interview a bunch of customers. When they brought back the data, the manager (or the team, collectively) acted on it by coming up with new product positioning. Some years later, after countless product iterations and three acquisitions, the product landed at a tech giant that does $30B/year. The author speculates it was then responsible for $1B in revenue, though doesn't know for sure. So... It's fair to say "I was there early and it was neat to solve these problems for a DB that later ended up at SAP." But to imply that your work directly resulted to $1B in revenue--as this title does--is just nonsense. What the F*ck were the editors thinking.

whack 6y ago
Why so angry. The title reads: > How I helped reposition a database product that went on to make $1 billion in revenue It doesn't say "How I single handedly repositioned" or even "How I repositioned". The author literally helped in the process that led to repositioning. By uncovering a key use-case for the product, which then became the key feature and selling point of the updated product. And regarding the comment about $1B in revenue, is there any good reason not to give her the benefit of the doubt? She literally worked with the team and rubbed shoulders with them every day. A lot of non-public numbers get talked about casually at the water cooler. There seems to be a trend where people are hyper-obsessed with nitpicking titles and calling out "clickbait". In this case, the article title is a pretty great representation of the article's contents - or at least as great as you can get in one sentence. I personally enjoyed the article, and was hoping to read a discussion about the main points raised in the article, or similar stories others may have. Instead, the top comment is an angry rant nitpicking the article's title.
- OnlyOnes20 6y ago
  Could not agree more. Thanks for posting your positive response.

abiogenesis 6y ago

> And we had almost killed the product! Well, one could argue that you killed the product. You just reused the source code for a new product. A product is much more than the software.

wyck 6y ago

This happened at the first start-up I worked at, 3 years in and almost bankrupt, one large customer kept using the product for a different reason ( kinda hacking it all together), so we completely pivoted to survive with this customers needs and it became a huge success. That pivot was towards such a niche market that no one was really in the space, and no one outside it would have really even know about it.

achow 6y ago
Can you please give a link to the product page - assuming that you commercialized it for others as well.
- wyck 6y ago
  No sorry, but I can tell you it provides video/text/meta data archiving for many countries' parliaments and state legislatures.

astroalex 6y ago

Completely unrelated to the content of the article, but I find it so annoying when interview responses are rendered in italics. For contrast, here's a nicely typeset interview from the NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/25/magazine/hannah-gadsby-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/25/magazine/hann...

huangc10 6y ago
Not sure why you're downvoted. I completely agree. I couldn't get past the first answer because of the italics. Why would someone do that. I'm sure it's an interesting Q&A, but I just can't read it.
laegooose 6y ago
Totally agree. Italics are hard to read. Main text must be in regular font.

ykevinator 6y ago

This is stupid

willart4food 6y ago

It was the year 1999, remember that? I was working at a startup and we were preparing to IPO. I got a cold call from a - I kid you not - "Color Consultant"; I don't know why but I listened to her instead of hanging up, her spiel was: "Do you know [Inser name of recent IPO]? Well they hired me and I changed the color of their corporate identity from Black on Green to Green on Black; well 4 months later they IPO's raising $250 million at a $1+ billion-dollar valuation". WUT? Her implication was that she was taking credit for the successful IPO. So, there it is. I am not saying that April's contribution was not useful, but... everything in a long process is useful, but not 1 single contribution is responsible for the entire (or majority) of success. Except for grit!

pkaye 6y ago
This reminds me of an early job. It was my first job as a mechanical engineer. I was lucky enough to work in a R&D team on an entirely new product line. Crazy but rewarding work from months on end. Near completion, I was moved to a side team to help out with other smaller projects. At this point the marketing guy comes in to decide on the name and color of the machine. So they bring in the consultants and in the end decided to stay with the name the engineers gave it and the same color as older machines (beige and black.) And the kicker was at the launch party they forget to invite me but invited the marketing guy who spent a couple days helping out. What a punch in the guts it was.
- abraae 6y ago
  I've been in more than one meeting where, after lengthy discussion about product name, the group circled again back to the original (temporary) name created by the developers. And in that time it had somehow subtly become adopted by marketing as theirs :) (To be fair, picking names is hard, even if you are in marketing. I'm sure there's plenty of science, but one of the best ways IMO is to just blather them all around for a while and see what feels right/sticks after a day or two).
hnick 6y ago
Imagine if they didn't change the colours and got a $2 billion dollar valuation! Ever since learning about opportunity cost it has infected my mind with cynicism.

redis_mlc 6y ago

I'm going to give a lot of credit to April for this, and say the title is not click-bait. Long before sqlite, or CouchBase, there was SQL Anywhere. And SQL Anywhere had something in the 90's that's still rare even today - hands-off built-in production-ready replication. (MySQL struggled for a decade to ship reliable replication after Yahoo paid them $40k for the original statement-based replication, and Postgres still doesn't have a great story out of the box.) It's that multi-source production-ready replication that April shone a spotlight on that made Sybase worth $5.8 billion when it was sold to SAP. https://www.zdnet.com/article/sap-acquires-sybase-for-5-8-billion-but-why/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sap-acquires-sybase-for-5-8-bi... So kudos to April for finding a huge diamond in the rough. I've been to lectures on SQL Anywhere, but I hope some day to use it in a project. It's a killer embedded database. Source: DBA.

icedchai 6y ago
I worked on some systems in the 90's that used Sybase SQL Server (AKA Adaptive Server Enterprise, not the Anywhere version.) Maybe "Anywhere" is okay, but you'd be laughed at if you suggested using Sybase SQL for a project these days. It's legacy tech.
- projektfu 6y ago
  SQL Anywhere is also legacy tech, but so is MySQL 5.x and lots of other established stuff. Sybase SQL Server was a real contender for a long time and IIRC shares a lineage with Microsoft SQL Server. All the major SQL vendors maintain a huge legacy of design dead ends that they have to continue supporting because applications were built when they were the next big thing. I used this software in its prime back in ‘97 and it was quite clever. It had none of the problems of its main competitor, Microsoft Jet (Access). MSDE was still a few years away. Plus, it was cross platform, so us Microsoft haters could get behind it, even if we felt forced to develop for the MS platform.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > Sybase SQL for a project these days. It's legacy tech. 1) SQL Anywhere is not "Sybase SQL." Different products, with SQL Anywhere being an embedded database that can run on a smartphone and replicate bidirectionally to other masters. Not many alternatives, even in 2020. 2) Legacy tech - when you care about your data, accept nothing less. Fun fact: the #1 most popular and regarded RDBMS for the past few years is considered to be MySQL, and it was the key technology that powered both Web 1.0 and 2.0. If that's legacy, I want more legacy. Source: DBA.

dblohm7 6y ago

I did my first internship working at Sybase on SQL Anywhere. Some great people worked at that office. Even some of the original Watcom guys were still there. Fun fact: SQL Anywhere was still compiled using Watcom C++ long after the latter was discontinued as a commercial product. Most of the people who worked on the compiler still worked there, so they maintained it internally until SQL Anywhere finally switched over to MSVC.

zaphirplane 6y ago
> MSVC I thought it ran on multiple operating systems
- dblohm7 6y ago
  It does. I'm referring to the Windows builds.
hodgesrm 6y ago
SQL Anywhere was wonderful, but Watcom C++ was horrible! When Sybase bought SQL Anywhere the compiler came along with it, hence was adopted as the in-house standard. As I recall the debugger would fail regularly due to pointer bugs corrupting the debugger itself. That's exactly when you would like the debugger to stick around... ;-)

listenallyall 6y ago

This is a strange story. Did the company really believe there was a large market of people who "had to manipulate some data and write structured queries, but you didn't want to do it in Excel"? What was the actual incentive or opportunity that the product was meant to fill? Did anyone acknowledge the popularity of dBase, FoxPro, FileMaker (with Access coming soon)? What was the product failing to do for the 90% of customers who bought it then abandoned it, surely some common themes must have arisen via all her cold calls -- and why didn't they address those issues? On the other hand, Oracle compatibility and sync surely weren't trivial to build, how were these features not already a major part of the marketing strategy?

suyash 6y ago

Click Bait Alert

andai 6y ago

To read the article normally, open the web inspector and add em { font-style: normal; }

blunte 6y ago

Lesson: know your customers and their needs.

sankalp221 6y ago

Please add RSS to the site. Would've loved to subscribe via my Feedly reader.

nstart 6y ago
They do have RSS. Unfortunately it's truncated at /interviews/rss.xml

yuvalr1 6y ago

I think that the talk here about taking the credit for the 1 billion is missing the point. What I think she wanted to emphasize is that they almost shut down a product that made more than 1 billion, and that she took part in the process that saved it.

Traster 6y ago
I think a lot of the discussion in here is about how whoever wrote the title managed to destroy any chance of this interview getting any meaningful discussion. Which I think is appropriate, because it's a blog about marketing that manages to market their blog about marketing with the kind of deftness I expect from my 8 year old daughter's rendition of Let it go.

hodgesrm 6y ago

SQL Anywhere was an amazing product. What's left out in the article is that it was also really fast. I had an assignment in 1998 to benchmark it against another pocket database. SQL Anywhere was 100x faster. On the Excel throughput graphs I had to use right and left Y axes for each product. Otherwise product #2 was just a flat line on the X axis. ;-)