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Comment pulled from techcrunch: Chris Zaharias · Having worked in sales at Netscape for four years (1995-99) I have to very respectfully disagree with Ben. Ne

• kb101 15y ago
  I recall working at a growing company that suddenly stopped blowing its forecasts out of the water and sales began to tank (part of an overall market downturn). C-level executives were slaughtered and we were soon treated to a blustery, military-metaphor-laced "hardass" speech to rally the troops, courtesy of the new VP who was keen to let us know that business was war and we were in it to win it, etc. It was lead bullet time. Fast forward some quarters later, after three rounds of layoffs, a refocusing of the product line on the core brands, and a general slow rebound of the market, and the company was back in the black... but: the blustery VP in question had nothing to do with any of this and had been shown the door (with a nice golden parachute). Additionally, opportunities to take advantage of new market directions were missed. The company's strategy was to bundle sales around the best-selling products and continue incremental development around those. Ancillary, low-selling products were cut. Which is all well and good, but the company is now vulnerable to several new competitors who took advantage of new directions in client demand that the VP of War Metaphors missed... and now the company is finding itself making acquisitions of technology and (more importantly) cultures that are completely foreign and incompatible. (Windows-centric old-school company trying to absorb open-source Linux-based startups.) So far the solution has been to leave the acquired companies relatively intact... "synergy" is non-existent and culture clash is evident, with top brass from the acquired startups fleeing as soon as their contracts permit. Additionally, the company is now facing the looming threat of cloud services and large-scale computing becoming cheaper and more commoditized. Unfortunately, nothing is being done to innovate or reinvent where reinvention is necessary; the current leadership does not perceive the threat (yet). (Disclaimer: I no longer work there, so they may have some stealth project to address this; but based on my contacts I doubt it.) After reading the other recent HN post by the same author entitled "Nobody Cares" and now this latest little bit of bullet-based sophistry, I must say flatly that I do not find these observations helpful. First of all, the war metaphor and language is distracting and obfuscates issues. But if we must stick with this metaphor, there are times when what hulks in the door must be brought down in a hail of lead, and times when the monster in the door is wearing a bulletproof vest-- so you better hope you have a silver bullet and the ability to accurately aim between the eyes. What strikes me most about the subtext of the OP's commentary is how lonely and unnecessarily self-limiting it is. I would not like to be running one of his portfolio companies and be faced with a challenge. It seems the likely response would be "you're on your own, nobody cares about your excuses, it's lead bullet time, not silver bullet time" etc. In other words, get me my return, I don't need to hear about anything else. Real insight is knowing who cares and who doesn't, and maximizing your connections to the former, disconnecting from the latter. Real understanding of when to use lead and when to use silver and when not to fire bullets at all is what guides a company through tough times, but more importantly, allows it to seize opportunities for growth. Simply spouting "tough"-sounding platitudes and militaristic mantras about winning wars does nothing to help, and is distraction more than anything else.
  • Retric 15y ago
    His point is simply sometimes the issue is strategy and some times it's execution. If you make a great MMO that people love but it's crashing all the time then fix the bugs and you just might end up making money hand over fist. If you make a solid but older MMO that people enjoy but the subscriber numbers are incontinuous decline then you might want to pivot into free to play etc.
    • corford 15y ago
      All sound advice but surely everyone knows this already?? I guess I'm missing the insightful part of this lead bullets mantra.
• hga 15y ago
  The market share graph starts at least 3 years after the release of IIS, it was in NT 3.51 SP 3 (and I gather released before that) and NT 4.0, which was released 29 July 1996 according to Wikipedia. I know IIS was solid for intranet use by mid-late 1997 when I started using it. It also starts near the end of the year "[ Apache ] became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone." (Wikipedia again and Apache was indeed what I was using in 1999.) That suggests both of those established a price of about $0 for a web server. I'm not sure the two accounts are mutually exclusive, as the further reply by George Scott suggests. A competitve web server, even if it was no longer going to make much money, was I suspect necessary for Netscape to sell or at least get established a lot of the rest of its set of servers (by the time the graph starts I can only remember people talking about their LDAP server). I.e. it's quite possible that if they hadn't expended those lead bullets the silver ones would have been wasted.