Love your customers
bcantrill.dtrace.org
bcantrill.dtrace.org
> Companies that have disdain for their own customers will be reviled in return. Such companies may be able to thrive in the short term, but they do not endure in the limit.
Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure.
I don't want to live in a world where one of the most successful and widespread corporate strategies is also disturbingly un-humanistic, but we're never going to find a better way unless our mental models for how customer relationships map to business success actually align with reality.
>> Certainly, these companies not endure as innovators: when coercion is your business model, innovation is not merely unnecessary but actively antithetical.
Oracle and VMware do seem like just rent seekers. I'm sure those rents do pay for plenty of nice things, but it's really hard for me to ever understand Oracle or VMware as an "innovator", beyond their initial innovations (their flagship DB, x86 virtualization).
> Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure.
IMHO it's perfectly fine for companies to live well, and then be sold. AFAIAC persistence is only proof of persistence. Sun created plenty of wealth/millionaires too. And, by Bryan's lights, it did so mostly ethically. That's a good life.
This is an entirely fair/accurate. I suppose what I am getting at is that these are just 2 different business models, and, the world can sustain a multitude of business models. There need not be only one (har har).
It's also fair to believe there is a moral dimension to one's own model which doesn't extract maximum value from the customer. Because IMHO "let's kick them in the dicks again" isn't an especially likable model, even if it is successful, and it's fair to avoid doing business with such people.
Imagine trying to sell your partners on doing business with Broadcom. If your core principle is "Broadcom needs to be around in 10 years", maybe the persistence/"kick them in the dicks" model is appealing, but otherwise, its fair for their competitors/Oxide to point out how awful dealing with a corporate sociopath might be.
There are plenty of customers that jump into deals with e.g. Oracle for a variety of reasons, and it's definitely worthwhile to spread the news far and wide about how difficult it is to work with these companies, doubly so if you're ideologically and economically competing with them.
I guess my point is that it's worthwhile to spend time understanding why this business model works in spite of all the shittiness, since the "hoping their poor treatment of customers will blow back on them" approach hasn't worked yet. I'm also fixating on the bad here, because I look at "both kind and nasty business models can succeed" and reflexively respond with "but why do the nasty ones succeed?"
As for Oracle and its putative endurance, I would liken it to the Berlin Wall: despite the seeming permanence, it is in fact an artifact that history will be eager to forget when given the opportunity.
> x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.)
> we spent too much time trying to help save microprocessor management from an unmitigated disaster of their own creation (UltraSPARC-III, cruelly code named "Cheetah"
In contrast, HP mostly (though it eventually split into two companies) managed to survive Itanium and compete with Dell. IBM continued to evolve Power and its other architectures and still sells AIX as well as Linux systems. Cray still exists as part of HPE. Apple migrated from PowerPC to x86 before hitting a home run with their own version of ARM.
In an alternate timeline, I imagine Sun still existing as an independent company and being the leader in RISC-V systems. But I guess Oxide is something of a successor?
If Sun couldn't design a good SPARC processor then they couldn't design a good RISC-V processor either. x86 was really their only hope but they didn't succeed there either, maybe because of the same old over-engineering.
Sun had some very smart people (what is Marc Tremblay doing at Microsoft btw?), and they could also have acquired more of them, perhaps like Apple acquiring PA Semi or Qualcomm acquiring Nuvia.
Also I wonder what might have happened if OpenSPARC had happened earlier, been more open, etc. (Indeed, a main reason why RISC-V exists is that there were IP issues with other architectures.)
Sparkling wine bottles are sometimes popped when the last installation of Oracle gets retired in an organization.
CIA contractors be like that sometimes.
This is a very common sort of wishful thinking that lets people bypass hard decisions. You create a company that loves its customers and employees and vice versa because you want to run a company that way. There are plenty of examples showing it's possible to run a sustainable business that way, and also plenty of counter-examples. There's no guarantee that it leads to business success or maximizes profits, it's just a choice you make.
But I will agree with the overall sentiment - in most places I’ve worked in software when I thought to myself “fuck that customer”, I was wrong. It was actually our fault because we weren’t meeting their needs or didn’t set a clear boundary on service expectation we were willing to provide to them.
So I see it as more “respect the needs of your customer and be prepared to part ways amicably”.
If you want to call that love, sure. But I think some customers can be abusive as well so I don’t agree with that word choice.
I work in a vertical right now where prospective customers are desperate to switch from the incumbent because of abusive lock-in contracts and poor service levels for obscene pricing based on ancient processes. So, overall, I have to agree with Brian’s sentiment even if I think it comes off as too idealistic.
Here the provider is being abused by the customer. Because of the nature of global travel, there is a race to the bottom phenomenon of what kind of tourist behaviour is tolerated. An old housemate of mine from university days, who runs a bicycle tour [1], makes his guests sign a document where they are made to explicitly acknowledge their role as travellers. The reward is a deep cultural intimacy.
This is why I use the term symbiosis in my comment further below. There is a relationship that needs to be understood by both parties and each has to have the resolve to not be exploitative nor to tolerate exploitation.
Speaking of that trip. I should go again. The food, oh man the food!
When an entity parts with their money for your product or services it is a recognition of the value you provide to them. There is symbiosis here. When you lose track of this, you end up with cronyism.
Ultimately, for the individual, it’s a matter of how you want to die. You either aim to have a fat bank account, or you aim to have a fantastic adventure making things you want to see in the world happen.
I think it’s pretty clear what Mr. Cantrill has chosen.
It's not gross, lawsuits are how you keep both parties honest. If you never sue your customers you are letting them walk over you and exploit you.
How many former Sun folks are in senior engineering management at Broadcom? Might as well have just posted the person’s name.
Wasn’t this guy you are badmouthing, asking you questions about Oxide tech, also arguably a customer, looked at more soberly?
I just don’t get the high horse. You’re going to defend llnl and Sandia and the nnsa no matter what, since they’re customers? Not badmouthing a customer is the eleventh commandment? It’s something folksy and nice scott McNealy said. It starts losing its charm when you bash people over the head with it in public humiliation rituals like you’re in the red guard or Khmer Rouge.
Broadcom is definitely not an Oxide customer -- and the (misguided) questions that were being asked were not about them becoming an Oxide customer.
Finally: isn't it a little hard to argue that I'm public humiliating someone who I am not naming?
It was on one of the OaF podcasts about dtrace. I worked for Reuters at the time and contempt for their customers was definitely a thread that ran through some parts of that org, even as it made a bunch of us feel very icky.
(I still have a side quest to find / talk to some of the people involved on 'our' side of the fence about this!)
Acknowledging that I don’t know you, and that I haven’t seen this private conversation, this post definitely reads like you just wanted to put a former colleague on blast semi-anonymously. I came to these comments to see if anyone felt the same.
> We probably disagree on this, but I don’t believe that there’s a basis for an assumption of privacy here
In my view you crossed the line when you included his gender, his current role and employer, and two former employers.
I understand that you are concerned about my former colleague (though again, a little hard to say that I'm putting them "on blast" when they are unnamed!), but my sympathies lie not with Broadcom but with the customers that they are screwing over: I have heard many, many stories from VMware customers being taken aback by the audacious things that Broadcom has told them -- the kinds of things that even Oracle has the decency to not say out loud. These customers don't speak publicly (for understandable reasons!), leaving no one to speak for them.
So yes, a Broadcom employee shooting their mouth off in an unsolicited conversation with me about their contempt for their own customers shouldn't assume that their disposition will be kept in confidence -- especially when it tracks with so much bad behavior out there!
I don't know whether I would've identified the person. As a principal-ish engineer and early startup person, who interacts with teams and all up and down the org charts of companies, it's important that people trust me. One part of that is to show discretion when entrusted with information. It's nuanced.
I have some WTF quotes and situations from recent interviews that I've decided not to share. The most recent one I did share was relatively mild, and I decided to paraphrase what the out-of-line person said, and be reasonably confident the person couldn't be identified. The incubator mentioned is harder to obscure, and is relevant to some people, so I tried to find a reasonable balance, but they should know who they are and be able to take some criticism, so I didn't worry much about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415495
When 2 enterprises love eachother very much,they don't sue eachother, they don't lie and tell customers they are the only one having this problem and most importantly,they stay together in a partnership and maybe work together to improve the product.
Valuable advice I once received was: sales is about trust, and this kind of breaks that. I think that the sane customer would explore option to migrate their services to other things.
I absolutely want a good partnership with the people who make my enterprise software. If I end up loving one of them, even better. However, paying Oracle, for example, and constantly fearing being sued sounds more like domestic violence, a bit like #WhyIStayed
Engineering wise, brilliant.
But very much out of touch with reality.