Speaking of not having a clue reminds me of the time the software
company I worked at for 6 years after retiring from IBM was bought out
by a larger firm. We were a specialty company that created performance
management software for IBM mainframes. The largest part of and highest
paid people in the firm had originally worked at IBM on the MVS and z/OS
operating systems because the performance management software we
produced required numerous hooks into and intimate knowledge of the OS
internals. In fact, the vice president of engineering (and my boss) had
once been the MVS development manager at IBM. (as an aside, he was also
the guy who, then as an IBM vice-president, signed the IBM PC-DOS
development contract with Microsoft).
At the time of the buyout the company employed about 200 people. Within
the first year we were down to about 100 with me being one of the last
of the 100 to go. Unfortunately, the clueless buyers seemed to have
chosen the highest salaried people as the ones to go. They seemingly
paid little attention at all to the loss of all the detailed product
knowledge held by the people they let go. Within a year it was apparent
that the remaining folks didn't have the total knowledge required to
mount another successful release. Within 2 years sales had fallen off
remarkably as the customers came to realize that the product was not
keeping pace with changes to the OS nor performing as advertised.
Within a few years the product pretty much ceased to exist and the
buyers had squandered their entire purchase and the jobs of 200 people.
It was a sad spectacle.
Chuck Norcutt
On 7/27/2013 3:24 PM, Paul Braun wrote:
> The mill had been owned by a Greek guy back when
> they started, but several years back was sold to a Russian firm that's been
> buying a bunch of small steel mills and consolidating. The people that
> were let go were all that were left from the original crew. Sad thing is
> that the HQ in Pennsylvania doesn't have a melt shop like her mill did and
> has no clue how to handle that. Oh, well.
--
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