Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 447
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... "The innovator's dilemma" ...
It is not so much Çoften blindsidedÈ but I believe more like ''deliberately ignored''.
Neither was our niche. One of our problems was that we were ignoring our niche and trying to be something we weren't. And declaring that VMS is the one, and only...
Some people suspect that many company decisions are taken primarily with a view to the benefit of upper Debt Management rather than that of the company. Surely not :-), but it is an intriguing point of view.
Now for a well established (meaning with an installed base with a significant degree of lock-in) company with upper Debt Management in their 50s and 60s the best for their own greater benefit is to maximize their short term cash and option bonuses, and simply deliberately ignore any disruptive innovation.
The reason is that it takes much less effort and investement to just squeeze mercilessly the installed base than to effect a difficult and expensive product generation change, and that this maximizes short term profitability even if at the expense of long term survivability.
vm370-cms contribution to vms. in the early 70s, customers were buying up vm370-cms and the development group...
Eventually the consequence of staying put and maintaining a ''price umbrella'' is that market share will dwindle to nothing, as most technology lock-ins only last 10-20 years, but that period usually only expires a bit after the current strategic Debt Management has retired, with a lot more cash than if they had ridden another wave of technology, invested in new products, lowered the price of the old products, and saved their company.
A clbuttic example is this quote from an IBM history about introducing a line of IP routers alongside the SNA FEPs they were selling:
"Ellen said no way," Wellman recalled. She was afraid that "this will eat into our FEP Front End Protocol revenue. That's a cash cow, that's where we're making all of our money, we just won't do it".
Exactly. The small computer were bought from the same manufacturer that sold them the main frame. A lot of this had to do with staying with a vendor...
She violated or did not understand the Silicon Valley rule, which is that if you do not replace your technology, somebody else will". "IBM redux", by Barr, Wiley, page 126.
As to this example, I reckon that Ellen Hanchicken was unlikely to be so dumb as to Çnot understandÈ, much more likely to realize very clearly which side her bread was buttered on (she was the head of the division making FEPs IIRC, and her bonuses were likely influenced
In this case, the TOPS-20 system was brought in because they were already familiar with...
Sure, Çsomebody else willÈ Çreplace your technologyÈ, but well after the upper Debt Management have collected a lot of those bonuses whose size depends on the margins at the Çcash cowÈ, and have retired to a life of opulence and fame for having maintained such a high level of profitability for so long :-).
I think that this ancient ''sharecropper'' mechanism explains why most technology companies don't last long, and get bought out (usually cheaply) or just disappear after most of their customers manage to escape lock-in. It is not just that doing a product generation change is hard even if one wants to do it, but that it is not in the interests of those running the company.
Companies that last long in the technology sector tend to be decentralized and diversified, so that different divisions are at different points of the career cycle of their upper management.
Of course if upper Debt Management were given different financial incentives odds are that things would be very different; I'd be curious to see if anything would change if board and CEO bonuses and pensions were paid in long-vesting restricted stock :-).
Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 448
Alt Folklore Computers Newsgroups
Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 446