How Software Companies Die (1995)
netjeff.com
netjeff.com
1) The company has grown complacent;
2) The company has lost touch with its userbase, or with the landscape in general, or with the competition;
3) The company has reached its liquidity event, at which point it's no longer "cool," and cannot attract or retain top talent;
4) A bad investor, founder, or partner took control and started making poor decisions, or a great one ceded control and left;
5) The category is disrupted entirely.
There are many more root causes, but you get the idea. The suits don't actually kill the company; they are just correlated with the death.
What's interesting to me is that you rarely hear about software companies that come back from near-irrelevance after a prolonged bout with it. I'm sure there are some obvious examples I'm not thinking of right now. In some respects you could almost even make the argument for Microsoft, assuming its E&D business continues to flourish and become more important to the company overall.
Furthermore, clueless marketing types don't even learn about most hot software companies when they're still hot. They only even discover the company after it's already old news or has become mainstream. If anything, this was more true 15 years ago than it is today.
The article confuses cause and effect.
It's not that the suits can't still do a lot of damage, because they can and they do. But they are not the driving factor behind a company's decline. They are symptoms thereof.
Will we ever get to the point where mass media realizes there we are capable of doing things like dating an attractive woman... without even needing to shower her with money we've scored big in our IPO?
As more generations are born, technology becomes more ingrained. I'm in my 20's, we grew up with technology. I was navigating DOS at 4. My wife remembers using Amigas. I don't have to ask anyone my age if they know how to use '...' because they do, it's innate. You give your average 50 year old a new piece of technology and they're lost.
Simply take video games. The amount of people who play are now astounding. I know girls that play CoD, who WoW, who're making levels on LBP, who were excited when SC2 came out.
For my generation I expect a lot of nerds will be dating attractive female nerds.
Nerds are also defined by a sort of intense interest level in their given fields. (Not coincidentally, Asperger's follows a similar diagnostic consideration set). A non-nerd may play Civ5, but will a non-nerd ever mod Civ5? Will a non-nerd ever intentionally hack the AI to improve the realism of diplomacy in Civ5, or to script out realistic reenactments of the Cold War? I did those things, and I really doubt a "normal" would have done them. I'm sure you have similar passions, projects, quirks, hobbies, interests, etc. -- that unique combination of traits that will always set you apart as a nerd.
Yes, in theory, these days it's a lot more socially acceptable for you to wear that nerdery as a badge of honor. But that's theory, and then there's praxis. I find that most non-nerds pay lip service to nerd-chic, but they won't actually walk the walk. I really doubt a non-nerd will ever entertain a conversation with me about artificial intelligence or string theory.
I showed up and when he saw who I was with, his jaw literally dropped. I had one of the hottest girls as my high school sweetheart. We won a "cutest couple" award that night. We dated for 3 years.
I know a lot of hackers (of either sex) with attractive partners. It's not hacking that's unsexy. My girlfriend encouraged me to play on the computer so long as she got the attention she needed too. She loved it when I built her a computer (it was completely purple in the 1990s, a rare machine). She even played a few Quake 2 death matches online with me.
But sometimes hackers are unconfident. That's a universal turnoff. After I dated that girl I went years without finding another girlfriend because I'd totally lost confidence in myself. Get some confidence, and even a computer programmer can get an attractive partner. I thought this was thoroughly documented in The Game :-)
I have noticed that the "Management Types" Card is describing still treat their employees as lesser beings, not because they're hackers, but because they're employees. And they have the same outdated ideas, like "Pay them a bit more" or "give them a family fun day!", and other stuff that programmers are a bit more cynical about
(sorry, couldn't help myself karma be damned)
Why? Because hacking is relatively friendly ground to them. They can excel, and they will be much less handicapped by their social shortcomings than they would be in other fields.
If you want to end the stereotype, you have to make computer programming equally unfriendly to the socially maladjusted, unshowered nerds. That would be a loss. Not only would programming lose valuable contributors, we would turn some number of those talented people into sorry, helpless losers who don't contribute anywhere. And that's the endgame: if every field vigilantly safeguards its social reputation against infiltration by potentially embarrassing nerds, then it will be impossible for nerds to contribute to society at all. For various reasons, hacking is hospitable to nerds: why not leave it that way? If you're uncomfortable being associated with a field that is unusually accommodating of socially inept people, then leave hackerdom and join a field that does a better job of policing itself. There are plenty of those fields, and not many safe havens for dorks.
[Edit: I am praying that nobody starts a subthread on the semantics of "nerd" and "dork." Please don't. Just read my comment the way it makes most sense to you.]
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43842 <- 5 comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99568
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552821 <- 23 comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635094
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637968
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1654310
http://searchyc.com/submissions/how+software+die?sort=by_dat...
I remember thinking this in my 20s. The novelty of making more than your parents wears of relatively quickly though. Having a mortgage in an affluent area pretty much blows that all to pieces. That being said, my feeling is that being in the industry as a worker bee often does not pay equal to what you are worth = the money you are bringing in. But isn't this true of all professions where you work for someone else?
Remember that the goal of all for-profit companies is to generate profit, and that profit is either returned to its shareholders (known as dividends) or re-invested in the company with the hopes of raising the value of the company (and hence the share price). You can get a piece of that pie by taking your hard-earned money and investing in the company you work for. Some companies even let you do this at a reduced price (stock options) or, if you're lucky, include a stock award as part of your compensation. If you're not a shareholder, you shouldn't expect to see any part of the profit: you haven't taken on the risk of investing in the company. (Yes, some companies do have profit sharing as part of their compensation, but that's typically a different way of saying "you get a bonus if we can afford it.")
Granted, many of these concepts are non-existant when you're working for a start-up (where generating revenue, let alone profit, is stalled for months or even years), but the end goal is the same.
I remember back in 2006 being shocked and appalled at how a city councilor was making more money that me. Here I am fixing the most complicated systems ever created and some low level politician has a bigger salary than me! So I went independent and now make substantially more than your average politician. Problem solved.
Good thing there's a shortage of bees.
Odds are, you're not. Well, intricate yes, but fine, no.
Yeah some of his believes are wrong, but this isn't one of them.
He really hasn't written anything that good since the late 90s.
The Red v Blue wars in America? Weird. The latter Enderverse novels could have been cranked out by current AI. Treasure Box? Enchantment? Snoozers.
"Ender's Game" in '85 and "Speaker for the Dead" in '86 — It's hard to decide which one was more awesome. They're very different, but both are really gripping and create two fascinating worlds. When I read those two books, I thought I had found my favorite author of all time.
"Xenocide" in '91 — Sadly, not as good as the first two, but still a pretty compelling book. Veers a little too close to becoming a paean to the wonders of marriage and fatherhood, but constantly course-corrects and is pretty successful overall.
"Children of the Mind" in '96 — It's a readable novel, but as the conclusion to the previous three books, I couldn't help but ask, "WTF?" It's way too involved in its own ideas to bother with compelling characterization, and it has this weird tunnel vision that essentially reduces all human interaction to marriage, divorce or some analogue for the two.
A review I read of his recent story collection said his recent stories didn't have to try so hard, he knew they'd get published and he was more or less keeping a hand in, his earlier work he's working hard and striving for quality, this applies in spades to the rest of his recent work and may well apply to any entity's (sometime) fall-off in effort or innovation after they've succeeded.
His early works were written when he was still relatively young and passionate and had years' worth of crazy ideas swirling around in his head. Fast forward 25 years, he's written all the good ideas he originally had, and he's now a middle-aged Mormon father and conservative political activist. If you read his books nowadays, you'll find they're pretty much what you'd expect from that description.
In thinking why this is, I have the following to offer: if it was "John Q. Random on Why Software Companies Die", there is a good chance it wouldn't rise to the top of HN quite so quickly. The accumulated reputation Card has is actually important for people reading this article. If this is so, then we must remember some of his reputation is being anti-gay-marriage: it is no less important to this article as is him being the author of Ender's Game.
This is in jest but most of the time external beliefs don't matter to the topic at hand. Such as do you discredit the work of Schindler because he was a womanizer and from most accounts a jerk, or look negatively on others who write about coding because when they aren't writing about coding they are out supporting the tea party perhaps.
Michael Moore seems to exemplify this perfectly. He holds strong opinions on a wide variety of (often orthogonal) topics, yet Americans seem to feel the need to either embrace everything he says as good, or be vehemently opposed to him on the basis of their disagreeing with him on one topic. Is it too hard to say "I agree on this" and "I disagree on that"?