[HN Gopher] The Inner Osborne Effect (2021)
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The Inner Osborne Effect (2021)
Author : luu
Score : 102 points
Date : 2022-08-15 23:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (raganwald.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (raganwald.com)
| pram wrote:
| Yeah this happened at Atlassian, beat for beat. Textbook
| incompetence.
|
| HipChat was a declining dumpster fire with endless outages, so
| they thought they'd make a new chat platform from scratch
| (Stride)
|
| So all the development effort was on Stride from that point. It
| was released, no one used it, and then under a year later it was
| shitcanned and "sold" to Slack. The dev team was RIF'd. Good
| shit!
| cestith wrote:
| Did a similar thing happen (minus the new product going away)
| in the Stash to Bitbucket transition? I also wonder how many
| people are not moving to Bitbucket Cloud when Server and Data
| Center are discontinued. Gitlab is still available to be self-
| hosted with full support.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| A most interesting read. Never heard of this effect. It makes
| sense. Maybe caught a whiff of it in some organisations. In
| highly compartmentalised setups you sometimes feel that another
| team is working directly against you. There's also the kind of
| anti-engineering, where one team builds a product while another
| within the same organisation try to break it. For example: one
| team is trying to make a great UI while the ad-revenue or DRM
| crew are screwing up the user experience sticking their oar in.
| These are the sort of things that lead to a feeling of betrayal,
| or that your team is second best. Making grand announcements that
| "soon everything will change" or that some hitherto secret
| product will upstage everything else is bound to be unsettling.
| If it's a secret, keep your mouth shut and quit posturing to your
| own congregation.
| realo wrote:
| Ah yes... I have seen something like that in a previous place I
| worked.
|
| One team was building a gizmo that could detect the difference
| between the exhaust of a fighter jet engine and the deployed
| countermeasures (for a missile, say).
|
| Another team was working on countermeasures that could fool the
| first team's gizmo.
|
| Fun times...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > countermeasures that could fool the first team's gizmo
|
| And on paper, what an economy! Where else would you find
| engineers with the expert knowledge better placed to defeat
| your own toys :) fubar, what a show :)
| neves wrote:
| The company is Netscape, right?
| sharmin123 wrote:
| khazhoux wrote:
| ...and then the current team is told they will focus on
| maintaining the "Legacy Platform" meanwhile the new team who has
| done jack shit gets 3 years to underdeliver, all the while being
| the golden children at the front of every line. The Legacy Team
| gets undermined and disrespected at every executive review,
| despite the fact that the entire company or program depends on
| them, either as infrastructure or to generate actual, you know,
| revenue.
|
| Oh, and after 3 years, the V2 Team will fail but simply move on
| to another project or company, with no accountability.
|
| Yeah, this sounds familiar :-)
| __derek__ wrote:
| A related rule I've learned: when someone says that they're going
| to introduce a new design system (which will fix _all_ of the
| problems caused by the _legacy_ one), run.
| darren wrote:
| Related evergreen post from Joel Spolksy:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
| gibolt wrote:
| The unspoken highlight of this is "don't piss off your team".
|
| Are people unhappy? Don't work against them with another 'hidden'
| team. Fix the problem they keep complaining about.
|
| If a big challenge is coming up, don't alienate the people who
| will be getting you through that challenge.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > only once--to my knowledge--made the grevious mistake of
| inflicting the Inner Osborne Effect on itself.
|
| They gimped the IIgs with a lower clock rate than possible to
| avoid cannibalizing Macintosh. It outclassed the contemporary Mac
| in a number of ways.
| tomkaos wrote:
| A manager start to tell everybody that we will get rip off our
| "old obsolete" report tool without any project, budget or
| research to find a replacement. We convince him to keep the tool,
| but the damage was done. Project, training of user, development..
| everything start to stall because nobody want to work with
| something that will be replace. 4 years later we still have to
| tell people that this is still the tool to use, but everybody
| just think it obsolete.
| ineptech wrote:
| This reminds me of an experience with a former employer. Company
| A, heavy users of Salesforce, was acquired by company B, which
| was married to M$ Dynamics. On the day of the announcement, one
| of the bullet points was something like, "the new division will
| transition from Salesforce to Dynamics over the next three
| years."
|
| I think it took three _weeks_ for all of the Salesforce admins
| and most of the devs to quit. They had to hire a small army of
| contractors just to keep things running, and last I heard, the
| parent company ended up switching to Salesforce anyway. All they
| had to do was say, "We don't know what we're going to do yet,"
| which besides saving them tons of money would've been literally
| true as well.
| _jal wrote:
| I've seen that sort of strategic ambiguity used to try to have
| your people and your decision too.
|
| It may work for a little while, but generally you're going to
| be left with the people who are young, naive or trapped. One of
| the problems with hiring smart people is that they don't stop
| being smart when you're trying to manipulate them.
| numlock86 wrote:
| > M$
|
| What?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Microsoft
| icedchai wrote:
| No one in their right mind would move from Salesforce to
| Dynamics. Both the UI and APIs pale in comparison to
| Salesforce.
| a_c wrote:
| On the flip side, there are companies unwilling to cannibalize
| themselves ended up having their market share gobble up by
| competitors. It is a fine line to navigate
| retrac wrote:
| > Apple III and Lisa failed. Macintosh was underpowered and
| overpriced on launch. But Apple continued to invest in Apple II,
| which financed investing in Macintosh
|
| Apple barely scraped through the Apple III + Lisa debacle. The
| Apple III was itself supposed to be the conservative product line
| that would fund the Lisa and other advanced development. They
| even added hardware to prevent accessing its extended memory and
| etc. from Apple II emulation mode; they didn't want developers
| targeting both platforms. The Apple II was put on the back
| burner. It wasn't going to get the new OS for the Apple III, for
| example, even though it could support it. (It did eventually get
| it, as ProDOS.)
|
| Development of the Apple III started in '78 around the time the
| Apple II+ came out. The Apple III came out in 1980 as a massive
| flop. The Apple III+ came out late the next year as another flop.
| Around then, the Apple //e was started in late 1981 as a rather
| rushed effort to expand the Apple II line, which by then had been
| completely stagnant since the release of the Disk II drive more
| than 3 years before, during a rapidly evolving time in the
| microcomputer market (the IBM PC had just been released). If they
| had just released a straightforward upgrade to the Apple II+
| around ~1980, instead of the overengineered Apple III, they might
| have been the IBM of the industry.
| cestith wrote:
| The IIgs was also a different platform from either the II, the
| III, or the Macintosh. It wasn't released until two years after
| the Mac. It outsold the Mac for a while, but the high price put
| it well above the price of an Amiga before it was retired.
| icedchai wrote:
| I wanted a IIgs for a while, but a BBSer convinced me the
| Amiga was a much better machine (also wayyyy cheaper.) The
| difference in price between an Amiga 500 and an Apple IIgs
| was insane. And the Amiga 500 could emulate a Mac!
| a4isms wrote:
| Author here. I remember the Apple III well, we nearly bought
| one for my mother's Real Estate brokerage. Ended up with a
| fairly vanilla Intel-based PC.
|
| Whew!
|
| But thank you for the correction on "Apple continued to
| invest..."
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(page generated 2022-08-17 23:00 UTC)