Conference 7.286::digital

    DEC will be poorer for it.

	If he's truly responsible for the prowess of our stealth marketing
	I bid him a fond heave ho!

	Keep that axe swinging Bob, there's plenty more firewood up there
	in DECassic Park.

    
    Shhhh!!  sleeping dinosaurs.

    i can't shed a tear for a vp of marketing leaving. his salary could
    support 3-5 customer support reps that talk to 20-25 customers a week.

    BJ is gone, love live Lucente. 
    
    Seems like good news to me. 
    
    John

    Bill was extremely hard-working, committed, and effective.  I worked
    with him years ago in the Mill.  He's the type of V.P. we need!  I'm
    sorry to see him go and I'm sorry to see people who don't even know him
    express negative opinions based solely on his title!  If random,
    scroll-by V.P. bashing is your favorite pastime, get a life!
    
    - Mike

    Re .-1
    
    People at that level of the company (just like any others) should be
    judged on their results. The more responsibility you have and the
    higher title you have the more visible are your accomplishments or
    failures.
    
    In my personal opinion overall MARKETING in DEC over the last few years
    has sucked. BJ was head of marketing for that period. He should be held
    accountable for his success/failure in making marketing a success.
    
    Let me ask you a question. If BJ did such a good job as head of
    marketing how come Bob Palmer went out and hired Ed Lucente as head of
    marketing? Surely if BJ had been doing such a bang up job there would
    have been no need for Bob Palmer to go hire somebody else to be head of
    marketing.
    
    Dave 

    As head of marketing for the corporation, BJ was a good engineer.
    
    					andrew

when BJ was in charge of software in the early 80s he set a goal of
DEC being recognized by the people that buy hw and sw as being the
best provider of systems software, by 1985. an INDEPENDENT survey
confirmed we had done it.  i give him credit for selecting an excellent
goal, sticking to it for years, and providing an environment where
the goal could be reached.  we could use more such vision and tenacity.

he has not been in the software arena for a long time, and we are
now far from #1.

re.7  I couldn't have said it better myself.  Maybe accountability is starting
to take hold, even in the ivory towers where it never has before.

Let's hope BP doesn't use up all his might swinging the axe, he's got a 
hell of dense forest ahead of him.

    His engineering results should be judged separately from his business
    management and marketing results, and the two should not be confused. 
    I'm sure he was a great engineer.
    
    I never understood why the "old guard" cultivated business managers by
    taking good techies, engineer types, and giving them management titles. 
    That's not to say that some engineering types couldn't make good
    business managers; the notion that just because someone was a good
    techie and should therefore be a good business manager is really kind
    of absurd.
    
    How come we don't have any corporate image?  How come we don't have any
    brand image for any of our products?  How come our advertising stinks? 
    Why does everyone in the industry agree that we have the worst
    marketing - and we acknowledge it ourselves over and over again in
    these notes conferences?  Yet we allegedly spend tons of money on
    marketing.  Where are these funds being spent???
    
    We need professionals that have a mastery of doing this stuff, with
    proven track records.  Mr. Lucente is supposed to fall into this
    catagory.  We're all waiting to see what he is going to do, in terms of
    doing some aggressive promotional and advertising campaigns.

   Wasn't BJ head of Networks during the time that we basically "lost" the
   network market (in terms of no multiprotocol router which allowed Cisco
   and Wellfleet and others to take the lead, long-delayed DECnet Phase V
   which allowed TCP/IP to take the lead, long delays and huge sunk costs
   in MCC, lack of a cheap PC networking solution that allowed Novell and
   Banyan to take the lead, etc., etc.)?
								- paul

re: .12

>   Wasn't BJ head of Networks during the time that we basically "lost" the
>   network market (in terms of no multiprotocol router which allowed Cisco
>   and Wellfleet and others to take the lead, long-delayed DECnet Phase V
>   which allowed TCP/IP to take the lead, long delays and huge sunk costs
>   in MCC, lack of a cheap PC networking solution that allowed Novell and
>   Banyan to take the lead, etc., etc.)?

He sure was.  His "fault" here was taking the word of his direct reports as 
gospel, even in the face of conflicting facts.

For years, he supported his direct reports, who said that TCP/IP was 
unnecessary, because "we have OSI".  (And if we actually had OSI, they 
would have been right.)

Finally, someone went over BJ's head to Ken Olsen, and presented the facts.  
Ken overrode BJ.  But it was too late.  Another market that we owned was 
pissed away.

That's what I remember.  Anyone remember it differently?

Ray

re: .7

>    People at that level of the company (just like any others) should be
>    judged on their results. The more responsibility you have and the
>    higher title you have the more visible are your accomplishments or
>    failures.

I didn't know BJ personally, however I tend to agree with .6 more than you.

I do know that in the relatively short time BJ was VP of marketing, he'd taken 
a number of steps to increase the professional levels of expertise of 
"marketing" within Digital, including training people to be marketing 
professionals at some of the best schools know for their business programs.
Perhaps the fruit of that work is yet to bear.

Perhaps we will continue to develop real marketing professionals in Digital,
instead of the pervasive attitudes I remember dating back decades to the days
when are CEO claimed that we didn't need any darn marketing, our products would
sell themselves.  Remember those days?  There was NO commitment for marketing
at a corporate level then. With BJ there was.  I suggest that it takes time to
change directions from one corporate philosophy to another; and that BJ (and the
current management) were/are turning the ship in a new and better direction.

    re: <<< Note 2602.11 by PIKOFF::DERISE "I'm goin' to Disney Land!" >>>
    
>   I never understood why the "old guard" cultivated business managers by
>   taking good techies, engineer types, and giving them management titles. 
    
    In hind sight, it's very easy to understand why this happened.  Money.
    Technical types could expect only modest raises in salary and responsi-
    bility unless they went into "business management". I saw several good
    technical people who were promoted into management, given excellent pay
    raises, and turned into terrible performers. The bosses that did the
    promoting thought that they were rewarding the technical types, but in
    reality it was creating a management disaster from which we are just 
    now beginning to emerge.
    
    re: .13
    
>>  Wasn't BJ head of Networks during the time that we basically "lost" the
>>  network market (in terms of no multiprotocol router which allowed Cisco
    
> He sure was.  His "fault" here was taking the word of his direct reports as 
> gospel, even in the face of conflicting facts.
    
    I remember being bitterly disappointed during the mid-eighties when we
    went from being the innovative open network leaders to proprietary dog-
    in-the-manger in two short years.  Even if we *had* come out with OSI
    and some of the other products on time, we would have failed, because
    Engineering was too focused on creating the ultimate complex network,
    not on providing practical customer solutions.
    
    Geoff

I object to those who know nothing of this man, taking such liberties to
criticize him.

BJ headed up NAC, possibly our most successful product organization ever.

As mentioned earlier, BJ put us on the map for software quality and
functionality, a position which we have subsequently lost since he moved on.

And incidentally, TCP/IP is now one of our biggest software products, and 
despite the general corporate attitude opposing the most obvious networking 
trend in history.  Opposition to TCP/IP within this corporation has been so
pervasive, for so long, I seriously doubt that BJ can be held responsible
for it.

I find it the height of arrogance to focus only on the relatively small and
few failures of a man who did so much for this corporation.  When you have
done half as much, I'll be glad to listen to you complain.

I, for one, am sad to hear he is leaving.  

tim

DEC TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS Engineering

  Before bashing B.J. for the faults of the sales force, consider how much
worse things were when he took over. 

  Back in 1981 I left Digital for a time to work for a startup. Like a good
"DECie" I pushed for them to use Digital computers but everyone resisted saying
that it was almost impossible to work with DEC. 

  I decided I'd prove them wrong and when I was asked to look into a new CPU I
decided to call DEC as well as Motorola. When I called DEC, the sales people
were out. No one knew where they were. No one asked to take down a message.
After several attempts I finally got someone who asked how many systems I
wanted to buy. When I said I was just inquiring, he almost hung up. 

  By contrast, I made one call to Motorola and within two hours, two salesmen
showed up at our shop with two briefcases packed with information about their
Versa-bus board and the 68K. They were even ready to recommend cheaper 68K
boards from other manufacturers in case we found their board too expensive. 

  Now I realize that this is anecdotal, but everyone at the company said that
this was typical and I've heard similar stories from people elsewhere. What a
shock. What I saw sure wasn't the DEC I had seen first hand in engineering. 

  Things are much better in Marketing and Sales today than they were back when
B.J. took over. They still have a long way to go but try not to forget just how
far they have already come. 

  George 

>I find it the height of arrogance to focus only on the relatively small and
>few failures of a man who did so much for this corporation.  When you have
>done half as much, I'll be glad to listen to you complain.
    
    Losing market share, mindshare, and billions of dollars are hardly
    "small and relatively few" failures.  Although he purportedly headed
    corporate marketing, this corporation didn't DO marketing, and we fell
    behind.  
    
    BP talks about accountability -- this is accountabilty: BJ failed, and
    he's gone.  If I fail, I expect nothing less.

       I find it amazing to criticize like some do...with no basis of facts
    to go from. 
    
       If you check, I think you'd find that BJ left on his own...not by
    "the axe"...
    
       I hope the replacement will do well...time will tell.
    
      JM

    >   If you check, I think you'd find that BJ left on his own...not by
    >"the axe"...
    
    How can you tell?  Whatever happens, a high-ranking employee
    always "decides to pursue new opportunities outside Digital".
    It's the standard face-saving phraseology.  No-one ever
    says "we fired him because he screwed up" at those levels.
    
    Sort of like "musical differences" for 1970s rock groups, y'know?
    
    I have no idea what the truth was in this particular situation,
    and I don't particularly care one way or the other.  But I certainly
    don't take the usual announcements at anything like face value.
    
    

I have always been impressed by BJ. He did preside over NaC during the
best years and the years in which they lost momentum. The fallacy that
he had anything to do with that demise is exposed by absence of a return
of momentum after he left. 

Digital has been and largely remains an Engineering led organization. Our 
problem is that we have engineered the wrong set of products. Anyone trying to
blame marketing for that just doesn't know how this Corporation works. Things
are changing though.

There does seem to be a feeling, at large, that what Digital needs is new
blood. That bringing in new people will magically transform the Corporation
into the powerhouse of old. To see the fallacy in this just look at the
Q4 results - our revenues fell. Bob Palmer has applied the financial
restructuring needed to ensure that we survive but has done nothing to
address the fundamental problem [of declining product revenues].

We remain a Company that has been overtaken by technology and yet from top to
bottom refuse to admit it. Witness the dialogue a few replies back as people
debate whether NaC's problems were due to a poor decision between TCP/IP and OSI.
That is yesterday's battle! Neither of those technologies count for much on
the desktop today.

Mark

RE                    <<< Note 2602.21 by METSYS::THOMPSON >>>

>Digital has been and largely remains an Engineering led organization. Our 
>problem is that we have engineered the wrong set of products. Anyone trying to
>blame marketing for that just doesn't know how this Corporation works. Things
>are changing though.

  I'm not sure I agree entirely with what you have said. It's been quite a
while since Digital sent engineers out into the world to talk to customers and
try to envision solutions to their problems. 

  It is true that at one time engineers called the shots and during those days
the company grew at a rate of 30% per year. Today decisions are made by various
combinations of people including financial people, marketing, and engineering.
Add to that the fact that most engineers do not interface directly with any
customers and it's not hard to understand why the right things don't get built.

  The problem is that very few engineers with the training necessary to apply
scientific principals to solve real technical problems ever get to see the
problems first hand and the people who do talk to the customers don't have the
scientific training necessary to envision innovative state of the art solutions.

  George

>  The problem is that very few engineers with the training necessary to apply
>scientific principals to solve real technical problems ever get to see the
>problems first hand and the people who do talk to the customers don't have the
>scientific training necessary to envision innovative state of the art solutions.

Hear, hear!

    There's something called Customer Advisory Boards that regularly meet
    and hear presentations (under nondisclosure) from DIGITAL Engineering
    Management, and who respond with their views on our plans.  This
    activity is still funded.  There may well be other formal channels for
    such interchanges but I'm not aware of them.  Those who are should
    respond if they like.
    
    There WAS another channel called Engineering Interface Program that
    existed up until the last round of TFSO.  It was funded mostly from
    Corporate Research (part of Engineering), with additional contributions
    (up until recent years) from the Field.  EIP's mission was to organize
    teams of Consultant Engineers (or equivalent) and bring them face to
    face with their opposite numbers among our customer accounts, or among
    potential customers, on their sites.  We would work with Engineering
    management to identify product or service areas of interest, and with
    the Field to identify those accounts likely to be interested in
    discussing their wants and needs with DIGITAL, under nondisclosure,
    with a time-scale or 2 to 4 years out.  We encouraged free interchange
    of ideas & plans, and got as many local demos as practicable.  The
    DIGITAL engineers valued this program highly, we were told.
    
    Interested parties are still welcome to scan our work product in
    RDVAX::SYS$PUBLIC:EIP*.* and to form their own opinion of the value of
    this work.
    

RE           <<< Note 2602.24 by NRSTA2::KALIKOW "Supplely Chained" >>>

>    There's something called Customer Advisory Boards that regularly meet
>    and hear presentations (under nondisclosure) from DIGITAL Engineering
>    Management, and who respond with their views on our plans.  This
>    activity is still funded.  There may well be other formal channels for
>    such interchanges but I'm not aware of them.  Those who are should
>    respond if they like.

  This is a good start, but the problem is that if only engineering managers
participate then only engineering managers are doing engineering. The grunts in
engineering are not engineering at all but rather doing something that would be
better described as hardware/software construction, following the plans of the
few who do get to see the problems first hand. 

  Back in the mid 70's I was working in technical support for a large insurance
company with about 300 programmers. The ratio of "system analysts" (people who
looked at problems and designed and developed solutions) to "programmers"
(people who did nothing but code) was about 1.5 to 1 not including managers. 

  That meant that over half the programmers were actually talking to end users
to understand the problems 1st hand. Remember, engineering is defined as using
scientific principals to design and develop solutions to real problems. If we
only send managers out to talk to end users then we have no real engineers
looking at actual problems which means we have no one actually doing any
engineering. 

  Digital currently has one of the best engineering staffs in the world. There
are more engineers at the principal level than any other single level yet we
are squandering that advantage by cloistering the engineers in small cubicles
limiting them to software construction. Meanwhile marketing and management
people are the only ones to go out and look at the problems 1st hand, but they
generally don't have the up to the minute engineering training necessary to do
the job. 

  Is it any wonder that the company that invented the mini-computer (PDP-1) and
the buss architecture (PDP-11) has not come up with a single state of the art
invention in 20 years?  Remember the slogan "We change the way the world
thinks"? When was the last time someone changed the way they did business
because of something invented at Digital? 

  Unless we get our engineers (and I mean most of our engineers) out looking at
real problems, we will never regain the leadership position we once had. 

  George 

    Re .25, I'm not claiming that EIP got grunts out with customers, but we
    had no objection to Principal Engineers joining EIP teams, and invited
    several with great success -- both in terms of the quality of the
    recommendations of the team to the Engineering Community, and for the
    careers of the P.E.'s who went out.  
    
    Which is why I thought it curious that in a time when DIGITAL is
    supposed to be listening to the customer more, that we instead cut off
    one of our ears.  Van Gogh worked in a visual medium rather than an
    auditory one and was still inspired from within, so it didn't cramp HIS
    style too much.  Beethoven was a genius so far ahead of his time that
    he could coast for the rest of his life and still create great music,
    though his encroaching deafness closed him off from his creations. 
    
    DIGITAL is not in their league.
    

    If corporate management is not responsible for the performance of the 
    corporation, then who should be?  A corporate manager is supposed to
    lead, set direction, set the example for his/her employees, be
    concerned for the customers' needs and requirements, and yes be
    concerned for the stockholders - you know, the owners of this company, etc.
    
    Prior to Bob Palmer and the changes he has instituted, where did the
    corporate management do any of these things?
    
    The buck has to stop some place.  The fact is, this company has been
    mismanaged for quite some time.  The people responsible have to be held
    accountable.  So far, the brunt of the mismanagement has been born by
    the employees that have been TFSO'd, the stockholders of this company,
    and by our customers that have had to tolerate one bad decision after
    another (if you were a customer would you trust Digital?).  
    
    Who has benefited from all this?  The competition!

Current DECvp count 2 out 1 in

Hopefully the trend will continue

Altogether now, courtesy of Queen

	"and another one gone, another one gone, another one bites the dust"

    Pretty depressing...like being at the French Revolution and watching
    the mobs cheer as one head after another rolled, whether or not the
    "honoree" deserved it or not.   That revolution, born in idealism and
    unchecked by good judgment, led to injustice and irrationality. 
    
    I'm no fan of our corporate marketing.  I think it is incompetent.  I
    am a fan of accountability -- I think it breeds a healthy respect for
    reality, which is too often ignored in this company.  Still...
    
    I'm a salesman, and I only met BJ once.  He met with my account team
    for dinner prior to a customer call.  I can say he is the only one of
    the old-line VPs that I would have trusted to run this company.  He was
    articulate, interested, and didn't play mind games.  I didn't know him
    well, obviously, but I stand by my opinion.
    
    As to the running discussion of his accomplishments, I won't try to
    defend his marketing record.  I suspect he was doing a better job than
    what showed to the public, but was fighting against a corporate culture
    that is xenophobic and mind-crippled.  
    
    For his most recent assignment, and its lack of success, perhaps he 
    deserved to get cut.  I do believe in accountability.  But something
    else may have been at work.  In this company, this often happens:  a good 
    person tackles a tough job, and  gets nothing for it, while people who lay
    low and stroke their superiors continue to get promoted.
    
    You only get punished for trying.
    
    As to the discussion of engineering contact with the public, there has
    been too little.  My experience is that the real engineers were kept
    locked behind armored doors.  They didn't want to go out and talk to
    customers about real problems (especially if they involved deficincies
    in our own product).  The messy, real-world stuff didn't interest them.  
    They wanted to be left alone and funded to develop "neat" things.
    
    As an engineer, I understand their attitude.  As a businessman, I think
    it's criminal negligence. Engineering was King, and that arrogance 
    contributed to our insularity and our competitive ignorance.
    
                                                                  

    
    re: .29
    
    Excellent historical analogy.  In our current passion play,
    who plays Robespierre?
    
    Glenn

       This seems to be a corrolary to the Peter principal.  Just because
    someone is a good engineer or engineering manager, what qualifies them
    to be a marketing manager?
    
       I'm sorry that the guy didn't realize that he was in over his head
    and leave the position before things got as bad as he did.  In these
    times of good workers being dismissed, and other good workers leaving
    to greener pastures, I don't feel too bad about someone being pushed
    out due to lack of performance at BJ's ex-level.
    
       I only wish that the politics of the situation would let BP fire
    people he wants to get rid of, as least it gives a clear message,
    instead of leaving the event open to interpretation, as this one is.
    
    					-mjg

    
    Ditto.
    

RE: .22 and others and Engineers not visiting customers.

Perhaps I can expand on what I meant by an "Engineering lead organization"

Where does product strategy come from?  Let me use the analogy of the EEC.
They have: 
	o A Professional Commission - that proposes strategy
	o A Parliament - that reviews and revises those proposals
	o A Council of Ministers (the Country Heads) that pass it into law

This works as a very good model for the Digital of old.
 - The Engineering Staffs of (say) NaC [the senior engineers and Managers]
   propose strategy. In general the Senior consulting engineers would have
   the largest say. Management and (NaC) Marketing would review it, amend it
   and adopt it as the NaC Strategy. [I've used NaC as an example but this is
   how all Engineering Organizations work +-10%. 

 - This strategy was reviewed, amended and approved by the Strecker Committee.
   THe STF would send back strategy, suggest modifications and remove redundency
   BUT like the EEC Parliament, it does not propose strategy.

 - The Executive Committee (like the Council of Ministers) actions this strategy
   by funding it. Again it does not propose strategy.

This is what I mean by an Engineering lead Organization - one where the 
substantive part of product strategy comes from Engineering (quite different
from odd Engineers visiting customers).

If that was Digital of old, what happens in Digital today?

Well, substantially the same thing. The STF is replaced by the new STF and
the CBU technical directors have a r�le in amending and accepting strategy.
However, they do not propose it.

The ability for Marketing to affect change is very limited. Which is why
replacing BJ with someone else who has the same degree of influence over
product strategy is pointless (only opinion of course!).

If we are to transition to a market lead organizaton there needs to be a
mechanism wherby those responsible forfollowing where "the market" is going
are able to affect product strategy. The only way this can be done is for
Engineering funding to be channelled thru marketing rather than bypassing
them as it does now.

Mark

    For many years I admired BJ, back when I had some idea what he was
    contributing.  Even when I worked for Frank McCabe in Corporate Quality
    I referred to BJ as the first Quality Leader at Digital.  It was BJ who
    sent Lou Cohen out to learn from Deming and bring back his learnings
    and get us started toward catching on to Deming's wisdom.  I also
    recall telling Sam Fuller in horror how BJ asked a room full of
    software engineers to raise their hands if they had been with a
    Customer in the past year, and very few did--and not too long after,
    Sam inititated the visits to customers by Consulting Engineers process
    referred to a few replies back.  All because BJ thought it was
    important for engineers to know the customers directly, and made it
    obvious that we were getting painfully out of touch.
    
    As I say, I don't really know what BJ had been doing recently.
    
    But I do think bashing people you don't know just contributes to the
    heat-death of the Universe.  Some things take years.  You don't get
    to *count* results from such things right away, if ever--so the idea
    of *accountability* is hard to apply when people plug away at difficult
    long-term-oriented tasks.  From what I do know of BJ I'm willing to
    trust his ethics, his dedication, and his intelligence.  I don't
    know how much poorer Digital will be for his departure, but I'm sure
    it'll be poorer.
    
    Elsewhere among Notes people lament our inability sometimes to deliver
    for our customers what they need--sometimes our inability to even tell
    the truth (or make the truth we thought we told, come true.)  Part of
    the solution has to be to diagram things so we can cope with the
    complexities of the Real World.  Deming has been and will continue to
    be a key source for learning how to do that, and BJ put at least the
    Software world in touch with that source.  We're by far not finished
    with those learnings.  Neither are we finished getting our engineers
    out there, close enough to the customers so they "smell the warm
    armpits" as Ted Levitt expressed it to us back in the '60s.  BJ stood
    for these things;  did things to get the learning going and fuel it.
    
    I'm sorry to see him leave
    				Russ

    Well said, Russ.  BJ was also a longtime supporter of DECUS and in 
    making sure that that was an opportunity for our engineers to develop
    relationships with some of our customers.  I'll miss him too.
    
    Bill