Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

I remember my father doing this one. He was an SME support company. With two clients. He cranked the price up 4x and said ”we’ve got them by the balls”. They both opened a tender process and shot him and he was bankrupt 6 months later.

View on HN

4x and in one go is too much for many to bear. If you do it at 25%-50% a year or so you can boil the frog with much more reliability.

Everyone and everything is replaceable. The question is if it’s worth it.

A shakedown price increase means that your vendor isn't your partner. Because major vendors are business partners.

It's like blackmail. If you pay up, how do you know another one isn't coming the next year?

But... Oracle stays in business, so what do I know.

Exactly. I do not know how what is happening with VMware didn't happen to Oracle years ago, apart from them being a legal firm with a tech product attached.

Because Oracle does have an actual product and team that is actually skilled and delivers what they promise. Sure, there are competitors that might do similar, but they also cost a pretty penny.

I'm guessing those examples are legion. Always treat your costumers and partners with respect. Another famous example is BeOS thinking they have Apple by the balls to be the basis for OSX. Demanded an outrageous price, Apple just used a BSD.

That is not a good comparison. NeXT was far more than "a BSD". It was a whole bunch of frameworks, development tools, applications, and a hardened team that had already ported to several other architectures. BeOS was still mostly vision at that point.

wasn't Next actually developed by the former CEO of Apple as well?

Yes, Steve Jobs was CEO of Next when they got bought

that seems like it had way more to do with the decision that anything technical. What the team at Next built is quite impressive as well, but the goal was to get Steve Jobs back.

> They both opened a tender process and shot him

What does that mean?

They approached multiple vendors for quotations who undercut him vastly. So he didn’t get the business.

I read as https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/get-be-s...

I interpreted it as "fired him"

They went shopping for a new vendor by sending out a request for proposal to multiple companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com