Conference 7.286::digital

Sounds like something out of Dilbert.

And I'm for world peace, and would like to become a waitress or prime minister
someday.

    
    	See note 3131.24 also. But in reality IBM wishes it were Digital.
    
    	They'd have 200,000 less people!!!!
    
    	And Gerstenter could collect a $1,000,000,000 bonus and make Eisner
    	look like a rookie.
    
    	Come to think of it....... 8*(
    
    		the Greyhawk
    

>> 1. The marketplace is the driving force behind everything we do.
>>    and a never-ending focus on productivity.

>> 5. We never lose sight of our strategic vision.

from 1 & 5 we deduce that IBM has vision for the marketplace.... 

re: <<< Note 3132.4 by POLAR::MOKHTAR >>>
    >                              -< OS2 all the way >-

>from 1 & 5 we deduce that IBM has vision for the marketplace.... 
    
    Huh?  How does your reply-title match up?
    
    Name one Digital product that sold over 2 million copies in the past
    year.  OS/2 is outselling Windows NT plus Unix combined, in total
    desks.
    
    Of course, that doesn't change the fact that IBM's "principles" are
    self-contradictory and meaningless.

    
    	This is kind of interesting. Does Ford or Toyota have a vision? How
    about General Foods, or the tobacco companies?
    
    	IBM has products that meet market demands for price, availabliity,
    useability, etc. The RS/6000 is another wonderful example. We charge
    resellers freight to ship them PCs at 12% off list.
    
    	Watch H-Ps announcement Monday on their PC products and new
    policies, folks.
    
    	Vision is '70s thinking, or Wall Street technobabble. Customers
    want price, reliability, ease of use, etc. The field sales force could
    give lessions to the SLT all day long on what the market wants - and it
    ain't politics as usual.
    
    		the Greyhawk

>>>      <<< Note 3132.6 by POBOX::CORSON "YOU CALL THAT A SLAPSHOT....?" >>>
>>>                           -< Vision is unnecessary >-

    
>>>    	This is kind of interesting. Does Ford or Toyota have a vision? How
>>>    about General Foods, or the tobacco companies?


	Greyhawk,

  	   I disagree with your "vision is unnecessary" and yes Ford has
        a Vision. It's to "become the low cost, high quality producer of
        cars, to be the best in class". I would also say
        that they probably "secretly" want to be the "largest", "overcoming
	GM". 

         Rick
    

    
    	Rick -
    
    	Not to get picky here, but Ford has a vision - like what a car is
    going to look like in the Year 2010, or how it will corner, maybe the
    trim on the hubcaps. Please.....
    
    	This vision thing is vastly overrated. Markets (people who buy
    things, and people who by stuff - we are being rather broad) care
    about now. Wall Street cares about now, employees of Digital care about
    now, customers care about now. What does it matter how computers play
    together in 2010 if I can't do what H-P, or IBM, or SUN, or COMPAQ does
    now???
    	
    	My customer is not writing Digital a check for later, he is writing
    it for now. And we better be able to compete now..., or they ain't
    going to be no later.
    
    	Let's move one step away from this vision thing. What is a vision
    anyway? What I think the future is? What you think the future is? What
    BP thinks the future is? Who cares? Not my customer, not our prospects.
    Maybe our current install base (who by-the-way are unplugging VAXs as
    fast as they can find the power cords), maybe.
    
    	Look at the back of the Digital News and Review. Look at what 6000s
    are selling for in the open market. This should tell you something. It
    is not good news.
    
    	If customers want UNIX, we should give it to them like they can't
    get it any better anywhere. If they want SCSI disks, sell it to 'em by
    the truckload, best quality, best price. They want PCs, sell 'em the
    best at the price they require to give you all their business. If we
    can not make money in this market, then we got a problem - not the
    market has a problem because it ain't buying what we're making.
    
    	I do not want vision. I want profits.
    
    		the Greyhawk

>    	This vision thing is vastly overrated. Markets (people who buy
>    things, and people who by stuff - we are being rather broad) care
>    about now.

Maybe, but if I were buying a computer that wasn't "perfectly open"
(e.g. a PC, where every piece of hardware, including the processor chip,
"box", and the OS level for DOS/windows applications) were multi-source,
the vendor's long-term prospects and commitment to the product (including
whether they had enough "vision" to be making decisions that would allow
them to be around when I go to buy my next system), would figure quite
heavily.

MS and Intel didn't get to where they are by being "distracted" with
trying to do too much, and were extremely persistent in promoting
and sticking with their core items.  (Gates sticking with Windows
*even though* the first versions didn't do well is a good example
of "the vision thing" - noone doubted MS's commitment to windows
after having been through that.)

Does Digital have the long-term commitment from the customer's perspective?
Would DEC MIPS customers say so (particularly if they were interested
in OSF/1)?  Do DEC's VMS customers believe so?  With yet-another-strategy
in the works, are even DEC's Alpha customers going to believe so
(particularly if the company is hemmoraging employees)?

>    	I do not want vision. I want profits.

It would appear that an awful lot of profits come from "vision", follow-
through, and other people's view of whether there is a staying-power
commitment on the part of a provider.  (Put differently, it would appear
[at least to me - and I'm not an MBA...] profits frequently come from
temporary or sustained "monopolistic" profits.  For example, Apple was
able to extract a premium for an extended period of time based on it's
advantage.)

Some examples:

		    Strategic focus(es)
    MS		    PC software, specifically Windows platforms and apps
    Intel	    x86 architecture
    Apple	    The "usable personal computer"
    Sun		    Unix workstations
    HP		    HP-PA / Unix, printers
    Gateway 2000    Reasonable quality, low cost PCs

    Digital	    Alpha? PCs? Disks? Systems? (Digital '80s was arguably VMS,
		    which had a "critical mass" of software and 3rd party
		    items)

Put differently, which things would the company in question NOT be willing
to sell (and not just this quarter or next quarter...)?

> Wall Street cares about now, employees of Digital care about
>    now, customers care about now. What does it matter how computers play
>    together in 2010 if I can't do what H-P, or IBM, or SUN, or COMPAQ does
>    now???

Speaking for myself, I care about more than just now (of course, maybe
still "caring" is my first mistake...)  Companies are more than a bunch
of contractors working for the short term as a group.  (If the rumors
about 20K employees + 4wks severance are even close, the company is
effectively treating employees like contractors, and we're likely to see
about that much loyalty/motivation for achieving long-term results.)

>    	My customer is not writing Digital a check for later, he is writing
>    it for now. And we better be able to compete now..., or they ain't
>    going to be no later.

Yes, we have to be able to compete now.  However, a lot of purchasing decisions
are *just* like the stock market - future effects get figured in *as soon as
they are known*.  If you thought Digital was going to shut down RDB next year,
would you buy it today?  If you thought Digital wasn't persuing Alpha as
a serious competitor to x86 and PowerPC, why would you even consider buying
one today?

Profits rarely flow to late comers in ANY market unless they offer
a differentiating "vision" [or whatever you want to call it].  Gateway 2000
and Compaq are good examples of companies that moved up in established
markets because they managed to produce and market something different.
However, they were both startups and didn't have any baggage/structure
that Digital has.  (The current cost-focused "downsizing fever" seems
to be akin to bloodletting.  Digital definitely had some baggage several
years ago build up during good times [roughly akin to "fat"].  However,
we're to the point where reductions seem to be well beyond that...)

    Great note .9
    
    	But one fact keeps coming back. Where is our focus? I seem to
    remember from my business school classes that vision and focus are two
    seperate organizational behaviors.
    
    	Vision was most closely associated with the entrepeunerial company,
    ie: KO and interactive computing; while focus was targeted at
    operational excellence, ie: Japanese quality in automobiles.
    
    	My personal experience the past several years selling our products
    to newly recruited resellers is focus. We are continually inaccurate
    in shipping product on-time, are always experiencing "spot" shortages
    (that usually last months) of critical items, hardly ever invoice
    properly, refuse to take input from the field as to changes in the
    marketplace requiring product updating and new releases of product at
    new price points, etc. 
    
    	This leads new partners to seeing us as both an unreliable supplier
    and a price inefficient partner.
    
    	We need focus right now. The vision stuff can come later. If we do
    not focus on meeting the marketplace headon with quality, quanitity,
    and price, we'll keep cutting heads right down to zero and we'll never
    make a profit the whole way down. Fix it now!!!
    
    		the Greyhawk

On the 50th anniversay of D-Day, it feels appropriate to say:

Success = Long-term strategy + short-term tactics.

Good tactics maintain your ability to pursue strategic goals.

Lots of this text is similar to what Digital was talking in reorganisation
announcements 1-2 years ago.

If IBM improves with this, does that prove, that in Digital it was more
the implementation than strategies, that failed?

--Ritva

    re .12
    
    Call me cynical, and we may have screwed up the implementation but...
    
    I think it shows that all current managers, worldwide, went to the same
    business schools, read the same books and listen to the same gurus. An
    original thought would die of boredom rattling round in their
    collective heads.
    
    Andrew

    Let me make an input from across the Atlantic. I believe that Digital's
    problems are not in strategy but in execution. Let me elaborate. The
    strategies available to companies in the IT industry are finite in
    number and the strategies available to Digital given its history,
    culture and competencies form a subset of this number.
    
    Picking ANY strategy from those available and executing it in a
    determined manner won't bankrupt you. It may not be optimal but if you
    follow it through you will survive. What is murdering us is that when
    we pick a strategy/reorganise/change the colour of the logo/launch an
    ad. campaign we think the work is done.
    
    It's not. That was the easy part and it makes you no money. The hard
    part is executing the plan, changing behaviours, making tangible
    differences to the way we supply our product. It takes a lot of
    grafting, doing mundane things well, following through, making
    decisions, sticking with them.... you know the type of things that sole
    traders do every day.
    
    We don't need to constantly look forward to yet another vision or
    hear more business school cliches. Let's
    follow through on what needs to be done not change tack every time we
    meet an obstacle. The more obstacles we meet and knock off the road the
    better. We will not prosper by avoiding obstacles. They will just
    reappear around the next corner.
    
    
    Phew!!! I've needed to say that for some time. I feel better already.
    
    Paul

    I couldn't agree more strongly with -.1.  The strategie du jour
    approach has been driving me crazy for the last couple of years.  We
    haven't stuck with ANYTHING long enough to determine if it was really
    working.  I have a terrible suspicion that we've been switching
    strategies SO fast that we're constantly judging the current effort by
    the results of the prior one.
    
    \dave

    .15 is so true...
    
    I've seen it summarised as the fairy tale marriage syndrome:
    
    "...and they got married and lived happily ever after."
    
    Picking a strategy, or getting married, are the same type of action in
    that they signal the start of the hard work, not the end.

    Saw Larry Constantine (formerly of Constantine & Yourdon), one of the
    big players in software engineering technology over the last 20 years,
    at the Software Symposium V at LJO yesterday. His presentation was "Why
    Change Fails...and How to Improve Software Processes" (he said he added
    the subtitle after being requested to provide a more upbeat title [big
    grin here!]). The presentation was a list of 14 reasons why
    organizational changes fail.

    Number 3 was the Historic Event: somebody says "thou shalt change", and
    lo and behold, everybody expects things to be different from there on
    out. In other words, they want change to be a single point event in
    time. In reality, he said, change is a process over time. This process
    has its ups and downs before reaching a positive net effect. This then
    results in the "Technology Trap": during the initial stages of a change,
    things actually get worse because of extra overhead learning the new
    way, missteps getting started, etc. Given time, things will improve and
    eventually pass the point they were at before. However, the problem is
    that many organizations don't wait for the upturn, they bail when they
    see they are going downward. He called this a J-curve: short downward
    trend before long upward trend.

    So organizations tend to give changes enough time to disrupt things,
    then give up before giving it a chance to recover, frequently leaving
    them worse off than before with the "knowledge" that they tried the
    wrong thing.

    While Constantine obviously knows the state of affairs at Digital (he
    works just down the road in Acton), it is interesting that one of the
    most respected leaders in the industry pointed this out as a common
    pitfall in a generic presentation. Is anybody listening?

	Something else about the Software Symposium V ("Getting Results").
	It was chock full of practical ways of enhancing the software
	process, which is something many complain about but which is
	resistant to change.  Among the tidbits:

		- A standard tool for quickly and easily setting up
		  a standard project environment, complete with automatic
		  generation of basic software quality metrics (the
		  author is seeking funding to spread this across the
		  whole company;  I think that money would repay itself
		  many times over if people would be willing to change
		  (see -.1) and use the tool);

		- A discipline of software development which individuals
		  can use to improve the predictability of their work;

		- Ways of really getting something done at meetings;

		- Experiences of groups in this company where the application
		  of certain software process improvements yielded 
		  demonstrable improvements in the bottom line.

	It's easy to collect data if you have the right tools, and
	if you collect the data you can really prove something
	objectively about the quality of your product/process.  Mostly
	we don't do it because of inertia, because it's not in
	the culture, because we're too busy, or whatever.  So
	there's reason to change.  After hearing what was said at
	the symposium, I'm convinced a little discipline and teamwork
	could go a long way to saving us big bucks and lots of 
	frustration.

 	Tom