[HN Gopher] Rackspace founder says it's 'on trajectory of death.'
___________________________________________________________________
Rackspace founder says it's 'on trajectory of death.'
Author : dctoedt
Score : 180 points
Date : 2023-01-10 12:19 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.expressnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.expressnews.com)
| mike503 wrote:
| I've migrated multiple companies away from RS, usually to AWS.
| Very easy workloads and RS was charging them way too much without
| any useful support. This isn't surprising.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| At least their object storage service has super old ssl, and
| breaks under recent ubuntu lts versions, or really any ssl config
| that's reasonably secure.
|
| ETA for a fix? q2, q3 2023
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| The downfall of Rackspace started even before the Apollo
| acquisition. It was obvious back then that the company no longer
| had anything unique to offer the market.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| We tried using Rackspace as an AWS reseller, as they were
| offering a better discount and support package than AWS directly
| at the time.
|
| Our experience was:
|
| * the "support" mainly acted as a slow and unreliable go-between
| to AWS support
|
| * their billing was manual, slow, and inaccurate (which was
| highly alarming!)
|
| * whenever we raised issues with their performance, they would
| try to sell us consulting services
|
| We are not renewing.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I wanted better CloudFront pricing and AWS referred me to
| Onica, which later got acquired by RS. Frankly I don't really
| use it, I just get better bandwidth pricing and they charge me
| for AWS support (I've only ever messaged AWS directly, not
| Onica/RS). Honestly I don't know what they get out of the deal
| except maybe a kickback on the support I'm required to pay for,
| but I'd have paid that anyway if AWS asks.
|
| If they die off, I guess I won't miss it, but I can't say it's
| been a problem.
| pyb wrote:
| This is what's technically known as a "Ratner moment".
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The founder in question no longer works there.
| watersb wrote:
| Malls are cool again. They could sell theirs.
| tristor wrote:
| I was a Racker from 2010 to 2014, I left shortly after Lanham
| did, I was also located in San Antonio near Castle until 2022.
| It's a very sad thing that Rackspace is dying, but I must concur
| with the assessment. Apollo, like most private equity firms, is a
| bunch of bean-counters who are focused on financializing
| acquisitions, using their assets as leverage to extract money,
| and then offloading it to bag holders in the market who ride it
| down into the abyss. When I left Rackspace they had no debt, a
| massive war chest, and a reasonably competitive product offering
| to AWS that could have been capitalized on. As soon as Lanham
| left and they put an MBA sales guy in as CEO (Taylor Rhodes), and
| I heard rumors they'd turned down an acquisition from a major
| tech company but were considering a sell-out, I left to go do
| startups, and so did many other top-tier Rackers.
|
| It used to be commonplace in South Texas (San Antonio / Austin)
| tech scene to meet new Rackers and talk to them about the old
| days, and just generally see Rackers having a huge presence in
| startups and tech. You still see a lot of former Rackers around,
| but they're all so far removed from those days now that this is
| not how we identify when we introduce ourselves. Not much new
| blood. Apollo decided it would be more financially sound to get
| rid of the core values, end "fanatical support", delete the
| fanatiguy logo and branding, and then lay off every single non-
| management American worker to replace them with 2-3 people
| working overseas from India. Rackspace support has been a boiler
| room bottom-barrel call center since at least 2019, and the
| pandemic massively accelerated what was already on the horizon.
|
| The company has been culturally dead and financially doomed far
| before the ransomware attack. The ransomware attack is just the
| final nail in the coffin. Apollo took a ~$5B company with no
| debt, loaded it up to do multiple acquisitions theoretically
| worth $2B ($7B if you're following) and made it worth less than
| $1B on market. Real geniuses there, who managed to completely
| destroy a solid American company that helped create a burgeoning
| tech scene outside of the Bay Area, so they could pocket the
| money personally as they drove the company into bankruptcy.
|
| It's unfortunately a tale as old as time, or at least as old as
| the 80s. Private equity is a bunch of sharks doing leveraged
| buyouts to con retail investors into holding the bag. Hasn't
| changed since I've been alive, and isn't likely to change before
| I die. The moment Rackspace sold to Apollo, they were on the
| trajectory of death. It just took awhile for reality to set in
| and consequences to catch up.
|
| I don't always agree with Yoo and I don't agree with everything
| he said in this article, but he's absolutely right about bean
| counters ruining tech companies.
| systems wrote:
| well, back to basics people are blaming the MBA for ruining this
| company, but I have to disagree, I think there is good MBAs and
| bad MBAs
|
| since the 90s, MBA are thought about change and agility rackspace
| failure is basic, they failed to adapt to change, and were not
| agile this is a basic , basic scenario
|
| they had a bad MBA, a good MBA would have seen this long before
| it happened and would have made necessary changes , companies
| change and adapt all the time led by good MBAs
| alberth wrote:
| Rackspace was one of the first big "cloud" companies, before
| cloud was a word.
|
| They went in the direction of OpenStack, which didn't pan out.
|
| While at the sametime, Amazon ran the "Oracle playbook" and
| started offering Apps.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| OpenStack is more popular than ever.
|
| I always find it odd that people dismiss it.
| nunez wrote:
| Good point about OpenStack. If it had succeeded, Rackspace
| would have been in a much better spot. They invested a ton into
| it.
| ajross wrote:
| It wasn't OpenStack, that was just the attempt to recover.
|
| Rackspace just lost. They failed to grow into a market leader
| before their industry commoditized. When you're in the early
| rush, growth is all that matters. But now if you want to
| compete with AWS, you need to be cheaper to operate than they
| are, and that's extremely hard if you're not at their scale.
| GCP and Azure can do it, little companies can't.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| The one caveat here is that little companies can compete in
| particular niches in which they can provide a more tailored
| solution.
|
| For instance, Lambda Labs is "AWS for ML". They have GPU
| cloud instances with pre-configured ML packages and a network
| attached filesystem. That's all you need.
|
| The other day, I wanted to run Stable Diffusion, but I don't
| have a GPU. I went to spin up a GPU instance in AWS, but got
| hit with a quota limit. By default, AWS accounts have a quota
| limit of 0 for GPU instances. Presumably to prevent
| fraudulent crypto mining. You have to file a support ticket
| that is manually looked at by humans to get this limit
| raised. In my case, it took 4 days for them to raise it.
|
| I had an A100 instance running in minutes on Lambda Labs.
| It's significantly cheaper than AWS, too.
|
| I'll be using Lambda Labs for all my future GPU needs,
| significantly better experience.
| strgcmc wrote:
| I get your point about small companies occupying a niche as
| their distinct competitive advantage, but in this case, one
| has to ask the obvious question: why doesn't Lambda Labs
| have a problem with fraudulent crypto mining, if the bar
| for entry is so low and it's so much easier to be up and
| running in minutes?
|
| And whatever the answer is, one hopes that there is some
| particular reason why Lambda Labs doesn't think AWS could
| replicate it... otherwise, it wouldn't be a durable enough
| moat to defend their business model long-term.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's quite easy to explain. They don't have a problem
| because the people that contract them do it explicitly to
| run GPUs. They don't have to protect a massive number of
| people that don't exactly know what they are hiring.
| strgcmc wrote:
| That makes sense under a certain set of assumptions I
| suppose, namely that you might think AWS's problem arises
| mostly from normal customers not realizing that someone
| has hijacked their account to run GPU crypto mining
| without their knowledge, because GPU instances were not
| their intended use case. So "people that don't know what
| they are hiring" is the failure mode you're concerned
| with.
|
| But I wonder more about, say a fraudster using stolen
| credit cards or gift card abuse, to open an account, or
| abuse a free trial, and if Lambda Labs makes it super
| easy and low friction to start up a GPU, then the
| fraudster can open an account, mine crypto immediately,
| rack up as much crypto as they can for days or a month
| until billing fails or trial expires, and just try to
| squeeze Lambda for as much computing power as they can
| subject to Lambda's ability to detect fraud.
|
| Low friction for customers, usually translates directly
| to higher risk of abuse. AWS adds its limits and friction
| for a reason, not because they enjoy making life harder
| (esp. since, easier for customers == more
| business/revenue).
| arsenico wrote:
| There's Vercel, there's Netlify, there are more. They all
| have their niche offerings, which sometimes beat what AWS
| does. However, they're not a _generic_ cloud hosting
| provider as Rackspace is. Seems like specialisation is the
| only way out for them.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Niches like this are often ephemeral and poor uses of
| capital in the long run. Early on they prove a need exists
| and can be profitably satiated with the right solution. As
| long as the market stays minuscule the company introducing
| the solution has a moat to be a lifestyle business. Once
| the market is sizable enough though a big guy just offers
| the same service and consumes the market share.
| sixothree wrote:
| I think the ability to compete with AWS and Azure has crossed
| a threshold. If I tell a customer we host their data on a
| platform that is not AWS or Azure, we will have a lot of
| explaining to do before the answer is accepted. If I tell
| them it's on AWS they will simply ask a set of particular
| questions about patterns and practices.
| sitkack wrote:
| Rackspace is a zombie company at this point. They lost a SAN
| during some maintenance, no backups, remote volumes lost. And
| first tier support can't debug Linux VM liveness issues. They
| have to talk file a ticket and get a Linux SME on the case.
| cratermoon wrote:
| At least the private-equity folks Apollo Management Group got
| their pound of flesh, though, eh?
| tzs wrote:
| They've pretty much guaranteed I won't return as a customer due
| to one extremely stupid thing they have done with accounts (at
| least as of the time I moved to another provider...I don't know
| if they have since changed this): deleting all your servers,
| storage, name server configuration and all other things you have
| set up does _not_ reduce your monthly bill to $0. To reduce your
| monthly bill to $0 you must delete your account. An account using
| no services still gets hit with a $5 /month fee for support [1].
|
| That means that if I ever want something they offer and they have
| a slightly better deal than someplace I have an account with,
| their deal with have to be sufficiently better to be worth the
| hassle of creating a new account. That's fairly unlikely so I
| probably won't be back.
|
| [1] That fee was why I left. I just had one instance of the
| smallest VM they offered, plus storage for a couple backups, plus
| name service for my domain. The VM was used for a very low
| traffic website and hosting my email. When they added that
| $5/month support fee it raised my costs about 30%. I switched to
| Amazon Lightsail for my VM and switched from hosting my own email
| on my VM to hosting it with Fastmail. That comes to $8.32/month.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Rackspace was taken private, saddled with a bunch of debt while
| the stuffing cash into Apollo's pocket, and then re-IPO'd so
| Apollo could fleece the market.
|
| Major IPOs go into 401ks, Wall street wins, the average American
| is left holding the bag.
|
| Rackspace currently has $5B in liabilities! Any fund manager that
| bough Rackspace after it re-IPO's should be in prison for fraud.
| The banks that underwrote the IPO should be in prison for fraud.
| bsuvc wrote:
| More anecdata: I'm working with a customer right now who will be
| moving all their apps off Rackspace to one of the big cloud
| providers later this year (work is underway currently).
| gorjusborg wrote:
| https://archive.is/ISYqD
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Initial experiences with Rackspace in late 1999 and early 2000. I
| was amazed that every time I called 'support' I got a real live
| person. I called at 3am once on a Saturday, got a live person
| answering, and was connected with a competent support engineer in
| about 90 seconds. I was impressed.
|
| The server(s) we had cost a lot, but knowing you could connect
| with someone competent 24/7 was amazing.
|
| Then... a few months later... we _had_ to use it, and it was
| good, but they were about 2 minutes away from wiping our main
| drive. We 'd requested a new beefier server and requested either
| the drive be moved or everything copied over to the new server.
|
| Got a message new server was up - great. Logged in - nothing.
| Connect to old server? Nope - offline/disconnected. Ugh. Calling
| in got me a live person, and I stressed the urgency. We did get
| connected with someone, and they did find the right person, who
| was about to wipe the previous server. Crisis averted, but...
| immediately I start asking why the support ticket showed all
| requests as 'done' when... they weren't.
|
| We stayed a while longer, but it felt like they were growing too
| quickly even then to keep the 'fanatical support' model that
| initially attracted us. FWIW, I had a couple of dedicated servers
| at a small place in NH, and they were... $70-$80/month on
| average. The rackspace servers typically started at $500/month. I
| think we were paying about $1800/month for the setup in question
| at the time of the crisis. My belief in 'you get what you pay
| for' was impacted that day.
|
| I had another client years later (2010? 2012?) that used them and
| it felt like a completely different beast, far more generic and
| commodity like every other competitor, and I've never since
| looked at them again.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Similar experiences, they were amazing for the first couple
| years I was on a team that worked with them. They really
| provided amazing support and took a lot of the burden of
| managing infrastructure off our smaller teams. Then it changed,
| the writing was on the wall as public crowds grew but one of my
| last experience was of them wiping out one of my databases
| doing what should have been a non-destructive drive expansion.
| The kicker was they restored from backup, a backup from the
| previous evening and didn't bother to inform us. We found out
| when customers started calling asking where their previous days
| data was. Accidents happen but the whole cover up was
| unforgivable.
| preommr wrote:
| Question for HN crowd: What would a small startup even do in
| this case?
|
| - Talk to a lawyer?
|
| - Wait for customers to contact support, or send out an
| email?
|
| - Explain that a third party cloud service was at fault, or
| just give some general apology?
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| Never trust ANYONE, even yourself.
|
| You should have "oh shit" backups with another provider
| entirely, and in-house offline.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| "TNOEY" coined.
| gurchik wrote:
| Any company, even a startup, should have procedures in
| place for what to do when data loss occurs. I would hope
| that any service I'm a paying customer of would proactively
| reach out to customers in the event of data loss. Blaming
| the cloud service provider isn't enough because backups are
| ultimately your responsibility. But doing the "right" think
| is pretty tough if your cloud provider is not being honest
| with you.
| markatto wrote:
| I had very mixed experiences as a customer in ~2009 - it was
| definitely possible to get through to someone very competent,
| but it was pretty difficult. We were trying to use their
| "cloud" VPS offerings (I believe it was openstack-based, and I
| liked the idea of supporting something more open than AWS),
| which were extremely buggy (for example, we had to default-
| retry every api operation multiple times in scripts because
| pretty much every type of call failed 40% of the time.) I
| generally had better success getting information about outages
| by reaching out employees I knew on freenode than I did through
| official support channels.
| dmix wrote:
| > He puts the blame for Rackspace's deepening financial struggles
| -- it's posted a steady string of quarterly losses, and the value
| of its stock has fallen 80 percent in the past year -- on its
| replacement of tech-oriented leadership with board members and
| managers "who don't have any connection with the product.
|
| This seems to be the natural cycle for the vast majority of
| business, especially when the original founders leave or get
| pushed out. They enter a long period of stagnancy before the
| weight builds up and it collapses, or more often gets absorbed
| into a larger firm seeking a monopoly.
|
| The longer term Google/Meta stories are the rare exception. And
| that's not always a bad thing by any means.
| googlryas wrote:
| Why does this happen? It seems to be self inflicted fatal
| wounding that businesses would try to avoid.
|
| Is it just principal/agent problem by those who are in a
| position to extract funds from the company? Do people think "it
| will be different this time!"?
| rgbrenner wrote:
| It's not something they can avoid. These companies were often
| dead before any of those changes were made; and none of those
| changes would have been made if the company was growing and
| healthy.
|
| Let's say you're a late 90s company that rents servers to
| people (yes, Rackspace). There are lots of these companies,
| so to differentiate yourself, you hire some smart people to
| provide tech support and managed servers. You charge quite a
| bit of money (IIRC, they would charge like 400-500/mo for
| their cheapest server). Core technical ability is: managing
| data center costs/infrastructure and server administration
| (whatever is in RHEL certification). Companies love you, and
| give you lots of money.
|
| You operate this way for the next decade. Then one day a
| company comes along and says, _we 'll let people rent servers
| hourly for a couple of dollars. No support._ Some of your
| customers move a few workloads over, sales get a tiny bit
| harder... but your core customer base stays, because you sell
| fully managed servers and AWS doesn't. Your customers arent
| AWS customers, for the most part.
|
| This is the foothold in the market that will eventually
| destroy your business... AWS will keep adding services, and
| eventually support contracts (which most people wont buy,
| meaning in general, AWS will be cheaper than rackspace). Each
| time AWS becomes more competitive, your position deteriorates
| slightly.
|
| At some point, you recognize the threat, and decide to do
| something. You have two choices, which may be only one,
| depending on how much cash/resources you have available: 1)
| Start building features and services to duplicate your
| competitor. These will be expensive and becomes more
| difficult if the core competency of the two businesses isnt
| the same (like if you admin servers, and need to produce lots
| of software). This will burn through your capital and shorten
| your lifespan if it fails; and/or 2) You can control costs to
| ensure the business remains profitable. This will increase
| your life in the short term but ensure it fails in the long
| term.
|
| The options that many lay people think of like decreasing
| prices, or increasing sales (somehow??) arent real options. A
| product has an entire structure behind it to deliver it, and
| just decreasing prices will not solve the competitive
| position, while increasing losses. So shortened life span,
| and no solution. Increasing sales isnt really an option,
| because if you could sell more you would... when customers
| have another option they prefer, selling to them becomes
| virtually impossible. If you run ads, for example, you'll see
| your metrics deteriorate, and this will limit your ad reach.
|
| Now, rackspace did both of these things... they developed
| openstack... which was terrible (software from a non-software
| company, likely contributed to that)... and when that failed
| they went the cost control route.
|
| My point is: No decision was made to put the company in this
| position... it's a position they found themselves in... and
| unless the leader can copy or innovate rapidly to save the
| company, or move the company into another segment... they'll
| find themselves in this poor position and likely eventually
| die. This bar is incredibly difficult to overcome: even if
| the founder was innovative, finding a new innovative product
| on short notice on demand while the source of funding for
| that declines.... most people will fail. This is why
| microsoft, facebook, google put an emphasis on innovating,
| even when they do not need to... easier to innovate when your
| position is strong, than in the final days of your core
| business.
| pas wrote:
| thanks for typing this out!
|
| it was so strange to see Rackspace left in the dust by AWS,
| despite Rackspace seemingly going full steam ahead with
| OpenStack.
|
| yeah, OpenStack was a stinking pile of python shit cobbled
| together with RabbitMQ, mysql, an ungodly amount of hope
| and iptables rules... but AWS was also literally just a lot
| of Perl scripts under the hood, with a UI and UX that made
| DIY silicon plus Linux from Scratch appealing.
|
| yet AWS is now an undisputed king (with the same steak
| knives in my eyes UI/UX), and Rackspace is dying. but
| OpenStack lives on, and during this time k8s appeared from
| nothing and completely turned many things upside down.
|
| it seems the hard truth is that "fanatical support" was
| great, but it was simply not pushed far enough, and it took
| someone like Jeff Bezos to commit to it. (see "consumer
| obsession"). and probably the lynchpin behind "why AWS grew
| so big" is that the whole profit of Amazon was pumped into
| it. AWS has more PoPs, more services, more knobs, ... than
| Rackspace and OpenStack combined ever could have. and it
| has all these to be able to corner the market and
| completely extinguish competition. (as it did with books
| initially.)
| jakevoytko wrote:
| "Death by a thousand cuts" doesn't show up in a spreadsheet
| because each cut is hidden in a different cell.
|
| We've all worked in the industry long enough. We know that if
| you approach the PM and say, "man, I watched my girlfriend
| try to use the site on her phone this weekend. She gave up
| because every page tried forcing her to use the app," the PM
| would respond, "we did some testing and not many people stop
| using the site when this happens, and people who use the app
| are 3x more engaged, so this isn't true in practice." But
| those tests don't show what happens 3 months from now when
| your girlfriend uses a competitor that doesn't have any of
| that shit, and she thinks "wow this is so much better" and
| just never goes back.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > she thinks "wow this is so much better" and just never
| goes back.
|
| Worse still (for the original company), she then tells all
| her friends about the competitor that doesn't suck.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| I feel as if there needs to be a modification to the phrase
| "Data Driven". Data, generally, will not help you predict
| the future. It is however, fantastic at finding bias,
| inefficient existing processes and tracking the results of
| your changes.
|
| When applied blindly you end up with scenario you
| described. Product direction that says something isn't
| necessary because the question was never asked to begin
| with.
|
| Science without the hypothesis.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| "Data driven companies" aren't, because none of the
| people involved in making decisions ever took anything
| more than stats 101 and have never experienced a real
| world data situation where things are messy and if you
| aren't careful about how you measure and collect data you
| make it useless for decision making and also apparently
| because they don't teach goodharts law in business
| school?
| vagrantJin wrote:
| It seems you are seeking some logical, high minded reason.
|
| There isn't.
|
| It's all about money. Nothing more.
| apparentbilly wrote:
| Greed by the board.
|
| And screw the employees who have bills to pay, families to
| feed and may have been able to keep a business viable without
| this incessent need for quarterly growth.
|
| Pay the rents and wages and everything else is gravy.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Most businesses started by passionate technical founders fail
| as well, there is a selection bias in the big companies that
| are in the news. A lot is just luck, having a product that
| the market needs that can be sold at a profit without being
| undercut by competitors.
| ghaff wrote:
| There was a popular business book in the 80s called In
| Search of Excellence. Basically the authors distilled their
| findings down to some common principles like "Stick to your
| knitting."
|
| However, as our professor observed, for pretty much every
| one of the principles you could find counterexamples of
| companies that succeeded doing _the exact opposite thing_.
| And also, over long enough time horizons, you could
| certainly find companies where a principle like "stick to
| your knitting" worked--until it didn't.
| nprateem wrote:
| Industries evolve. In this case Cloud probably killed them.
| They failed to adapt when a new innovation came along.
|
| This can happen for multiple reasons, but mainly because
| incumbents are at a disadvantage in the face of radical
| innovation since they not only have to learn the new tech,
| but unlearn the old.
|
| Some companies also double down in the face of new tech and
| keep improving their obviously inferior product. E.g. when
| refrigeration was invented, companies that shipped ice from
| the arctic focussed on shipping it faster instead of
| accepting the inevitable and pivoting while they had
| resources to do so.
| hedora wrote:
| At some point, they decide growth from technical innovation
| has mostly played out. (Did Rackspace have a path to building
| a sufficiently disruptive product to grow another 10x?)
|
| At this point, the MBAs try innovating in finances /
| marketing, as that's likely to 10x profits over time. This is
| why all the big Detroit automakers were essentially banks
| that gave you a middling car for taking out a loan when the
| lending crisis almost wiped them out. That strategy actually
| worked great for their investors (until it didn't).
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Once you put an accountant or MBA in charge of any company the
| company is dead. You can't cost manage your way to growth.
| nprateem wrote:
| I know right. Why would you want someone who's actually
| studied business to run one?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Yeah I agree. I'd rather hire someone who has built a
| business than one who studied how other people built a
| business.
| rocqua wrote:
| The general counter-point is, why would you want someone
| who doesn't understand the work done by the company to run
| that company.
|
| Besides that, the polarization between management and 'the
| work floor' naturally leads the work floor to see someone
| who studied 'management' as the epitome of management, and
| thus as the epitome of 'the enemy'. Personally I believe
| the work-floor is right to be skeptical of the management
| style that is commonly taught. Because the style is not
| based on treating employees as humans but instead about
| extracting a much value from these human resources as
| possible.
| nprateem wrote:
| Only if your curriculum is from the 1950s. Modern
| leadership & HR programs emphasise multiple benefits of
| happy workers:
|
| * More productive
|
| * Less likely to leave (which is expensive)
|
| * More motivated to share cost saving ideas which can
| save companies millions of dollars annually.
|
| Healthy companies can employ workers longer too.
|
| A good manager doesn't need to know how to build the
| product. They need to understand their market, the
| company's strengths, make strategic decisions and create
| an inspiring culture.
| nerdawson wrote:
| > The general counter-point is, why would you want
| someone who doesn't understand the work done by the
| company to run that company.
|
| That reminds me of a great quote and one of the most
| important takeaways (running the opposite direction) from
| The E-Myth Revisited.
|
| "That Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the
| technical work of a business, you understand a business
| that does that technical work."
| bachmeier wrote:
| Since I can't reply to your other comment:
|
| > They need to understand their market, the company's
| strengths, make strategic decisions and create an inspiring
| culture.
|
| I'd say that's largely orthogonal to studying business. You
| need to understand why customers buy from you and what kind
| of value you are offering. An MBA isn't going to help or
| hurt on that dimension.
| nprateem wrote:
| Studying algorithms doesn't help directly with many
| coding tasks, but does provide people with a way of
| reasoning. It also makes people aware that eg some
| sorting algorithms are better than others.
|
| Similarly, studying business makes one aware of a wider
| range of issues and tools, and case studies allow
| learning lessons from others.
|
| If an MBA doesn't help with those things, you should ask
| for your money back.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| There are about 50 of founder-led publicly listed tech
| companies with share prices down 90%+ over the past 18 months
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > You can't cost manage your way to growth.
|
| Likewise, no family has ever moved up the economic ladder by
| penny-pinching. The best that penny-pinching can do is to
| stave off bankruptcy.
| conductr wrote:
| It can fund R&D, or a college degree for the kids. Those
| are often done for growth.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| But they spend four whole dollars every other day buying
| coffee!!! If they save two and a half of those coffees they
| could buy a whole banana! Surely they will be a millionaire
| like me in no time right?
| jibe wrote:
| Satya Nadella has an MBA from The university of Chicago and
| has been doing a good job.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| He has an MBA like I have a suit.
|
| Sure I have one, a few even. Yet I'm not "a suit".
| zamalek wrote:
| Nadella is a terrible MBA.
| [deleted]
| hardware2win wrote:
| I think OP meant pure, non tech related MBA
| [deleted]
| hef19898 wrote:
| How many of those do actually exist? At tech companies in
| the broadest possible sense?
| spamizbad wrote:
| Nadella got an engineering degree in India, followed up
| with a masters in the US - with that Booth MBA coming after
| he'd worked at Sun and Microsoft as an engineer.
|
| Pretty much every "Wow this MBA does a good job of running
| a tech company!" person has a story similar to this where
| they trained and worked as an engineer before obtaining
| their MBA.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Ok fine :)
|
| Go read "The HP Way" by Dave Packard. It was standard
| procedure for HP to hire promising engineers from Flyover
| State U and take the best and send them to Stanford for
| an MBA. This worked really, really well. Until it didn't.
| conductr wrote:
| That was the intent of the MBA, as a supplement to some
| other core expertise so they could manage the business
| effectively. Then, MBA's became an entire profession.
| Many consulting firm MBA's go to business school twice
| before having any real world experience (undergrad then
| MBA). I did business school for undergrad and refuse to
| get an MBA for this reason, I seriously had MBA students
| sitting in the classes I took as an undergrad.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Has he?
|
| I had to maim the Windows Update process to keep it from
| freezing my computer whenever I tried to use it.
|
| Clearly right when the user logs on is the correct time to
| install updates -- pinning the HDD to 100% use and
| preventing the user from accomplishing their task. After
| all, Microsoft is more important than the user and their
| needs come first.
|
| ...where is the improvement supposed to be?
| toast0 wrote:
| > I had to maim the Windows Update process to keep it
| from freezing my computer whenever I tried to use it.
|
| Windows update for Windows XP got worse than that. It
| would churn your drive for hours, but not make progress.
| There was an update to install manually and then you were
| good.
|
| But if you're running Windows 10 off a hard drive, you
| need to replace it with an SSD. Although, I guess you can
| probably blame that on Nadella, the mass layoff that
| included essentially ending the developer-in-test QA
| program was June 2014, and Nadella became CEO in Feb
| 2014. IMHO, quality dropped significantly since then,
| especially quality on hardware developers probably don't
| have or don't use (like hard drives and Windows Phone)
| Karunamon wrote:
| I don't think n=1 software bugs are really relevant to
| the overall trajectory of the company.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| i got some news for you about the quality of windows
| software
| maximilianburke wrote:
| Microsoft gets blamed when updates are applied because it
| makes the system less responsive.
|
| Microsoft gets blamed when users don't install updates
| and their systems get owned.
|
| In either case, Microsoft gets blamed.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Yes -- but there's a difference:
|
| - in one case, Microsoft seizes control from the owner
| performing unwanted actions that make the machine not
| function
|
| - in the other case, Microsoft didn't do anything; people
| turned off a feature they can turn back on
|
| There's a difference there important to free society.
| subradios wrote:
| You think of it that way, the customer doesn't.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| He was an engineer first.
| simonh wrote:
| That's true, but he got a degree in electrical engineering
| and a masters in computer science first, and picked up the
| MBA later in his career while at Microsoft. When people
| complain about MBAs they usually mean people who's primary
| qualification is an MBA.
| ssharp wrote:
| Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Jamie Dimon, et. al. are in charge
| of companies that are doing just fine.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I don't know of Mr Dimon, but tim cook headed apple while
| they pursued form over function, removing ports and
| creating the god awful butterfly keyboard for.... reasons?
|
| Satya has overseen microsoft to be very profitable yeah,
| but they haven't exactly been the best company, buying a
| bunch of popular companies that most people probably would
| rather they not own, and investing as much as possible into
| making using windows a terrible, ad ridden, telemetry
| infused pain.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It's interesting that those are the people you chose. Were
| you unaware of the background of the engineers?
|
| Tim Cook: degree in industrial engineering and by all
| accounts an operational wizard for supply chain management.
| That's why he was COO of Apple for long time focused on how
| to get components into its iPhone.
|
| Satya Nadella: electrical engineer with a CS degree and
| then an MBA and at Microsoft started as an engineer.
|
| Can't speak to Jamie Dimon as banking and finance is
| outside my wheelhouse, but certainly neither Cook nor
| Nadella are examples of MBAs who don't understand their
| product line. Arguably Apple's is a much simpler product
| line to understand whereas Nadella has many more B2B and
| B2C product lines, but I don't think the only thing Cook is
| thinking about are cost downs.
| ssharp wrote:
| I don't think my choices were particularly interesting,
| I'm was just loosely aware of their backgrounds and
| confirmed them as MBA graduates with a few searches.
|
| The parent comment (and a common HN trope) was about how
| awful MBAs are at running companies. Those are 3
| counterexamples to that trope. All three are highly
| successful in their CEO roles.
|
| Given that Engineer -> MBA is a pretty common path, maybe
| we should just stop with the broad strokes?
| newsclues wrote:
| The MBAs people hate, are the people who lack experience
| and took a short path to the MBA because they see it as a
| way to accelerate their career.
|
| It's a lack of experience + ego inflation from an
| advanced degree that is a dangerous combination.
| ssharp wrote:
| Are there good examples of people like this that then
| rose to the position of CEO and failed? There are plenty
| of CEOs who have failed, so is a disproportionate amount
| these "short-path" MBAs who have failed after climbing so
| high?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| In my comment MBA is a state of being, not a conferred
| degree.
|
| Jamie Dimon comes from financial services, which is a
| very different industry. Engineering minded firms in
| financial services were sponsored by finance folks that
| believed engineering / science / math / computer
| techniques towards finance would make them more
| competitive. Internally at JPMC Dimon invests heavily in
| tech and gives tech engineering leadership autonomy. So
| as CEO he has delegated a lot to the engineering culture
| and shielded it from the accountants and MBAs. (Again,
| MBA the state of being which can not be attributed solely
| to spending two years in a program)
| abakker wrote:
| See also: no true scotsman.
| btilly wrote:
| I think that the broad strokes capture something real.
| Namely that an MBA does not qualify you to run a tech
| company.
|
| As your examples show, it also doesn't disqualify you. In
| fact there are plenty of roles where it brings value.
|
| But the model of "I have an MBA, I can run any kind of
| business" is dramatically false. You need to have useful
| theories about how the company actually works to run it.
| And the theories by which tech companies work usually
| make a lot more sense if you have a tech background.
|
| There are exceptions - for example Meg Whitman did an
| excellent job of building eBay when she took over early
| on - but they are notable as exceptions. And I know of no
| exceptions among companies who are in one way or another
| primarily selling their tech expertise.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, and especially for people above a certain age, an
| MBA--whether a regular two-year program or an executive
| program--was often treated as table-stakes for a lot of
| roles at companies that weren't hands-on engineering
| roles. And, yes, in many cases, MBA grads who were
| looking to work at companies in computer-related fields
| had some sort of engineering undergrad degree.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Broadly speaking, anyone drawing broad conclusions on the
| basis of education is wrong. Anti-MBA, anti-engineering,
| anti-non-Ivy, anti-Ivy, _et cetera_. To the degree there
| is information in these conversations, it's someone
| holding these broad-brush views being generally
| unqualified for higher leadership.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Microsoft has been "doing fine" _financially_ , but look at
| their products and user feedback.
|
| Windows Vista and 8 were widely seen as colossal failures,
| Windows Mobile got utterly _destroyed_ by a series of
| dumbass decisions, Windows 10 /11 is a mess UI-wise, where
| the fuck does one even want to begin when it serves ads in
| the start menu, vendors keep pushing bloatware crap because
| Microsoft allows them to, developer experience is a mess
| because there are just so many different UI and other
| frameworks (although tooling _does_ have improved since the
| days you had to shell out thousands for Visual Studio),
| Microsoft software in general is riddled with bugs and
| security issues to a degree it puts even Adobe Flash to
| shame, its Office suite is a hotbed of UI issues, bugs and
| privacy issues...
|
| Microsoft is only being kept alive because of business
| moat, the competition being too focused on fucking up each
| other in bike-shedding and purity contests (a general issue
| in anything Linux sans, to a degree, the kernel) and
| doesn't have the money to hire actual UI/UX experts or, in
| the case of Apple, is just too expensive.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Windows is no longer Microsoft's main focus, and hasn't
| been for quite a few years. It's about 12% of their
| revenue. The main income is now Azure, Office 365, and an
| assortment of other smaller (comparatively) things like
| Surface, X-box, GitHub, etc. If Windows revenue would
| drop off to 0 tomorrow it would be a blow, but Microsoft
| would survive just fine.
|
| People keep thinking about Microsoft in 2001 terms but
| it's not the same company. This what Satya Nadella
| brought to Microsoft (don't think it would have played
| out like this under Balmer).
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > (a general issue in anything Linux sans, to a degree,
| the kernel)
|
| What do you suggest instead?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Delta Airlines has improved drastically, both financially and
| in terms of the product since their current CEO, Ed Bastien
| who is an accountant, took over.
|
| Meanwhile, Boeing sold deadly products under leadership by
| their engineer CEO.
|
| I see the "bean counter bad" narrative a lot here, but I
| don't think it's that black and white.
| mox1 wrote:
| The airline industry is more or less an oligopoly and
| perhaps even a commodity service, so growing market share
| kinda means not sucking. The basic experience of an
| airplane (getting from point A to point B quickly) hasn't
| changed much. I can see how a MBA / spreadsheet type at the
| top can add a lot of value here.
|
| Rackspace on the other hand is in the middle of a pretty
| cut-throat market segment, with lots of competitors and a
| large need to keep up with them feature wise. You
| absolutely need a visionary / this is what our market will
| look like in 3 years person running the show here.
| Rackspace _could_ have filled a need between Digital Ocean
| and AWS, but I don 't think they ever saw it that way....
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The decisionmaking behind those deadly products happened
| long before the CEO in question came on board.
| dv_dt wrote:
| The Boeing engineer CEO who replaced the accountant CEO
| (one of the first in Boeing history) under which most of
| the preliminary design of the deadly product was performed.
| mandevil wrote:
| The most important bad decisions in the Boeing case were
| made in 2011-13, when they promised that the 737 Max would
| not require a new type certificate for someone with a 737
| cert already, and that it would use the new, larger, and
| more efficient engines. At that point in time, the CEO of
| Boeing was James McNerney, who had a Harvard MBA, worked at
| P&G and McKinsey, then spent 20 years at GE (running their
| airplane engine business). When he lost the race to succeed
| Jack Welsh he went to 3M and then was picked to run Boeing.
|
| At the time that these key bad decisions were made for the
| 737 Max, Dennis Muilenberg- the engineer you cite- was
| running the Boeing Integrated Defense side of the house and
| had no authority on the 737 Max. He does bear some
| responsibility for the Max- he was CEO when it first flew,
| got certified, was delivered to customers, and the first
| crash that was not investigated with appropriate speed- but
| the most important bad decision was made when a MBA was
| running the company.
|
| International airliners and semiconductors are two areas
| where I've become convinced that engineering CEO's are
| required, because they both involve making 10 billion or
| more dollar investments that won't even enter the market
| for more than 5 years. So you need someone with a very good
| feel for technological possibility, one who understands
| that you can't bafflegab mother nature the way that
| Harvard's MBA school teaches you to.
|
| It's possible I'm over-indexing on Boeing and Intel:
| Airbus' big recent fiasco- though since it didn't kill
| anyone it's not nearly as big as the 737 Max- the A380, was
| largely a commercial failure not an engineering one (by
| some estimates the A380 never even turned a profit on fly-
| away costs, totally ignoring development costs). So maybe
| having Harvard MBA's and market people would have saved
| them. On the other hand, when those key decisions were made
| (2000 was when the A3XX was approved) Airbus had a
| convoluted two CEO-two Chairman structure designed (to this
| American's jaded eye) to prevent any personal
| responsibility from leaching back to the bosses, so I can't
| tell you who was in charge when the wrong decisions were
| made for that program.
| rocqua wrote:
| Reportedly at Boeing the culture at the executive level
| remains 'bean-counter focussed'. Does the opposite hold for
| Delta Airlines?
|
| It seems to me like the disposition of the CEO matters a
| lot more than their formal background. If an engineer rose
| through the ranks by siding with the MBA/accountants/bean-
| counting-culture in a company, he is likely to run it in
| the (presumably correctly maligned) bean-counting ways.
| Whereas an accountant who understands the bean-counters but
| has seen the pitfalls of that kind of management could
| easily decide not to manage like a bean-counter.
| robszumski wrote:
| One cool fact is that prior to running Red Hat, Jim
| Whitehurst was COO of Delta Airlines. He could absolutely
| talk the talk on open source software. I always thought
| that was cool.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think it's also a canard that the CEO is in charge.
| They're responsible, but often the CFO or COO are in
| charge, or some rule class culture of middle management.
| My understanding from engineers at Boeing it has not had
| engineers in charge for a long time and it's entirely run
| by accountants and business development.
| AceyMan wrote:
| iirc, Ed is a career DAL employee who bootstrapped to the
| CEO position, so while he's not an ops guy, per se, he
| still "gets" Delta and what makes it the company it is.
| That's a trait I suspect you'll find makes in every
| successful chief executive, irrespective of the industry.
| dralley wrote:
| "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was
| the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a
| great engineering firm. It is a great engineering firm, but
| people invest in a company because they want to make
| money." - Harry Stonecipher, Boeing executive and CEO until
| 2005
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-0402290256feb29-story.ht
| m...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Any sufficiently broad generalization is always wrong.
| Retric wrote:
| Find accountants are actually much better at C* positions
| than MBA's.
|
| It seems like there should be a lot of overlap, but I think
| accountants have a better grasp of the underlying business
| reality. Or at lest the idea that you can't get something
| for nothing so saving money on X likely costs you
| elsewhere.
| antihero wrote:
| > Boeing sold deadly products under leadership by their
| engineer CEO.
|
| I remember hearing I think in a documentary that the merger
| with McDonall-Douglas made it have a more business-y
| culture that lead the the terrible failures.
| wahern wrote:
| McDonnell-Douglas is often blamed for changing the Boeing
| culture, but it was the Boeing CEO Philip Condit who led
| the deal, and more importantly helped engineer the
| cultural takeover by strategically placing McDonnell-
| Douglas executives in key positions. Condit was at one
| point a lead engineer at Boeing, but was deliberately
| chosen by the Boeing board (at least the majority
| faction) precisely because they knew what he wanted to do
| with the company.
|
| The person who pushed back the hardest against the
| McDonnell-Douglas merger was the Boeing CFO Boyd Givan.
| He was quickly ousted not long after the deal was
| finalized, accused of being too financially conservative
| compared to McDonnell-Douglas' M.O.: https://archive.seat
| tletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug...
|
| The blame ultimately rests with the Boeing board. There
| was a minority faction on the board that fought tooth-
| and-nail. They couldn't stop it, but IIRC their
| concession (to prevent the minority from creating a
| ruckus in public) was being able to keep Givan as CFO
| after the merger. But Condit ensured that that didn't
| last long by undermining Givan at every turn, which was
| probably the plan of the majority board faction all
| along.
|
| Based on this and a few other anecdotes, and if we're
| making wild speculations, I'd say that whether a CFO
| makes a good CEO depends on the _type_ of CFO. There 's
| the traditional CFO--the "bean counter"--whose job is to
| manage the money and keep a low profile so the rest of
| the company can do their thing. Then there are the new
| generations of CFO, which started coming up the ranks in
| the 1970s and 1980s (see, e.g., McDonnell-Douglas), who
| see creative accounting (aka financial engineering) as a
| legitimate way to boost stockholder value and an end in
| itself, independent of a company's core competency. If a
| company has good bones, a traditional CFO can make a
| great steward at the very least. For the new type of CFO,
| they often couldn't care less about a company's core
| competency, and are more speculator than bean counter, at
| least in the traditional meanings of those terms.
| callalex wrote:
| How much of that can be attributed to Bastien being better
| at begging for bailouts and subsidies, as opposed to
| actually improving the company?
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Regarding Boeing, every person, and particularly every
| engineer, should read https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-
| Tragedy-Fall-Boeing/dp/0...
| mattcantstop wrote:
| A company named Apple seems to be doing well with the
| logistics guy at the helm as well.
| wwweston wrote:
| They're making money, that's for certain. They're not
| making new product categories and markets like they used
| to, though, just iterations on things they were already
| doing well enough (and sometimes those iterations take
| away more than give). Their established capital and
| position in the market are their strength more than any
| other particular vision or talent on display. That's
| enough to keep them strong for a long time on logistics.
| Not sure what happens if they face a well-funded vision
| challenger.
| raiyu wrote:
| Sure the current management team is full of bean counters that
| aren't doing great at understanding product, but don't give the
| old management much credit.
|
| They completely missed the transition to cloud, they missed
| AWS, and they laughed when I told them that we (DigitalOcean)
| wanted $100MM if they were serious about any acquisition talks.
| This was in 2013 so startup economics were different back then.
|
| They were early to a massive market that is growing and they
| basically botched their lead repeatedly and every transition
| since then has been a comedy of errors.
|
| They would have been better off following Equinix's model of
| just acquiring and managing datacenter space instead they ran
| their own DCs, didn't have great support, couldn't build
| product, and ultimately were acquired by PE and saddled with
| debt along with no road towards innovation.
| streblo wrote:
| I think this is just a story we (fellow tech-oriented types)
| like to tell ourselves and repeat, not because it's true, but
| because it sounds good.
|
| If you look, there are actually plenty of examples of
| professional management or 'bean counter' types taking over
| companies and running them more successfully than their former
| tech-oriented management. And also, plenty of examples of tech-
| oriented management ruining a good thing. But those kinds of
| stories don't get very good play on Hacker News.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| > running them more successfully
|
| The time scale that success is defined on is important here.
|
| The root of the issue seems to be that manager types don't
| view profit as the market's reward for making a good product;
| they view it as the product itself.
|
| If a product's quality is sufficiently high to begin with
| this can be great.
|
| Once quality dips to the point where it softens demand
| though, it can be the beginning of the death spiral [0]
| (tl;dr: when production chases revenue downwards and the
| company suffocates under its fixed costs), and market
| perception/demand lags cost-cutting product changes so the
| causes and effects can be very difficult to link through
| financials alone.
|
| [0] https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-is-the-death-
| spira...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| In general yes, but less likely for highly-technical
| products. Truth is you need several kinds of competence, they
| are each "legs under the stool."
| rendang wrote:
| What are some good examples?
| streblo wrote:
| One of my favorite examples recently is Frank Slootman
| (sales/operations/general management background) taking
| over as CEO for Snowflake, over Bob Muglia
| (developer/technical product background). The company's
| market cap is up >10x since Slootman took over.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Slootman is an excellent manager. I suspect he could run
| just about any type of business.
| runako wrote:
| Judged by earnings and general business success (not "do
| tech people like what they are doing?"):
|
| - Steve Ballmer @ Microsoft
|
| - Tim Cook @ Apple
|
| - Sundar Pichai @ Google (MechE by education)
|
| - Elon Musk @ Tesla (he is not an auto engineer, so
| functions as the monied management)
|
| There are a lot more examples out there. However, recent
| vintages of tech unicorns have been slower to replace
| founders in part due to dual-class stock structures that
| can give founders final veto over shareholder actions.
| ww520 wrote:
| Steve Ballmer work in Microsoft since 1980 years as
| employee 30th, arguably part of the founding team. I
| won't say he's a bean counter and couldn't relate to the
| products.
| runako wrote:
| Fair enough, the rest of the comment stands without
| Ballmer. I chose him because in some ways he was chosen
| by Gates because he is a bean counter. :-)
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Except for Elon Musk, who is/was extremely passionate
| about the product, the names on the list are not the peak
| of these companies. Steve Balmer performed reasonably at
| Microsoft after Gates, Tim Cook arguably after Steve Jobs
| and Google is lately a hit or miss on many fronts.
| runako wrote:
| > Judged by earnings and general business success
|
| I chose these leaders specifically because their tenures
| saw their companies earn tons more money than when the
| founders were in charge.
|
| For example: Jobs was visionary, but Cook's tenure has
| seen the launch/expansion of the Wearables segment and
| the Services segment. Those two are "only" a minority of
| Apple's revenues, but together form a business larger
| than Comcast or Meta or Target. Tech people won't give
| Cook credit for that accomplishment, but that's the point
| of this thread. :-)
| fidgewidge wrote:
| How much of that was just competently running companies
| that already had massive growth momentum behind them?
| tqi wrote:
| Its definitely not 100% true in either direction, but I think
| an "actual connection" to the product is important. Obviously
| YMMV on what an "actual connection" is, but to me that just
| means an understanding of what your product is / who your
| customers are / why your company has been successful in the
| past that goes beyond case study aphorisms like TAM / YoY
| Growth / etc. It's important because when things start going
| poorly, you need to understand where to lean in or divest.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| You mean like Twitter?
|
| (ducks to avoid storm of thrown shoes and knives)
| bombcar wrote:
| There are definite cases of corporate looting by the bean
| counters, but there are certainly cases where a moribund
| company was saved by the counters of beans (and of course,
| some where the malaise was so deep nothing could have saved
| it).
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The longer term Google/Meta stories are the rare exception.
|
| I think that is more that making money as an advertising
| monopoly is easy, and can not only support constant Google/Meta
| failures in many lines of business, but even the gradual
| deterioration of their core offerings.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| [dead]
| capableweb wrote:
| > The longer term Google/Meta stories are the rare exception.
| And that's not always a bad thing by any means.
|
| Seemingly there are two types of companies: "Killers" and "To
| Be Killed". In order for you to grow like Google/Facebook, you
| need to "Kill" (acquire) other companies, who will be the ones
| who die, eventually.
|
| Rackspace went to way of being acquired, so eventually to be
| killed. Google/Facebook went the way of acquiring other
| companies.
|
| The only way to win is to not be either. Just a company that
| provides enough profits to cover the expenses and pay out
| bonuses whenever, but not acquire others nor be acquired by
| others.
| brightball wrote:
| This sucks to see. I remember when it looked like Rackspace was
| going to be the primary competitor to AWS.
| geenat wrote:
| >replacement of tech-oriented leadership with board members and
| managers "who don't have any connection with the product."
|
| RIP
| hk1337 wrote:
| I honestly didn't realize Rackspace was still around.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| I have some clients who host at Rackspace. They have old-school
| monolithic web-app architectures (single web server that also
| runs the application code, and a database server). They're never
| going to rebuild these legacy application -- the codebases are
| decades old, and comprise hundreds of thousands of line of code.
| The support at Rackspace has really cratered, and it's hard to
| have much faith in their technical capabilities anymore either.
|
| I'm no sysadmin, so I don't know if it's realistic to port this
| kind of architecture to AWS or Azure. Also, some are
| contractually obligated to host at a facility that offers
| "managed hosting" (although I suppose the exact wording could be
| weaseled) with uptime guarantees and staffing levels.
|
| I'm trying to figure out where I should recommend they move. It
| doesn't seem like a common use-case anymore.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Assuming the application code is mostly stateless (it pulls all
| the data it needs from the database on every request), this
| kind of app is usually not a big deal to containerize and put
| on some cloud platform (AWS, GCP, Azure should all be about
| equivalent) and even get more 9s and scalability almost for
| free. This is essentially the Wordpress architecture, which
| every infra engineer (nee sysadmin) in the industry has been
| asked to move from on-prem to cloud sometime in the past ten
| years.
|
| If the application code has non-disposable state in-memory then
| it's bit harder but can usually be done, especially if it's
| low-traffic enough to comfortably live on single Rackspace dedi
| now.
|
| Edit: I should also mention that if you're looking for somebody
| to do this kind of work for you, there are contact details in
| my profile. ;)
| angst_ridden wrote:
| I'll have to look into the web-server customizations. One of
| them has a custom Apache module for talking to a 3rd party
| mainframe, but that should theoretically be movable too (if
| it's the correct platform architecture).
|
| Of course, an Apache module's just C code, so how hard could
| it be to port to another architecture? But in all
| seriousness, I suspect it's a relatively simple UDP socket
| communication interface, so it is probably portable.
|
| Thanks for the mention of Wordpress. It is a similar
| architecture. I'll read up on how to move a Wordpress
| install, and use that as a model for testing one of these
| apps.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Why is this _not_ a common use case?
|
| Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, EC2/Lightsail and many many other
| companies lease dedicated servers and VPS. Lease an app server,
| lease a DB server, move the data and port the code.
|
| Yes, no doubt there's some other 'devil in the details', but if
| it's already "old school legacy" architecture, why not just
| replicate that some place else that offers better service (and
| likely better value for money)?
| angst_ridden wrote:
| All good recommendations. I think the difference is in the
| contracts (I'm reporting second-hand, since I don't have
| access to the actuals). With Linode, anyway, I do a lot of
| hosting in VPSes, but these clients have contracts
| stipulating the hosting company manages/maintains/monitors
| the OS.
|
| I guess if I were smart, I'd get the actual contractual
| requirements from the clients. That'll be my next step.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Cloudways is a provider that does 'managed' on top of
| various cloud providers, and "Regular Security Patching" is
| one of their checklist items. There are no doubt others.
|
| Good luck to you.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation!
| seltzered_ wrote:
| See also this wonderful article and discussion from a month ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966585 (rackspace,
| fanatical support, and their downtime / hack )
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| [dead]
| thayne wrote:
| > This is not a company that's on a trajectory of growth. They're
| on a trajectory of death.
|
| Maybe Rackspace is on a trajectory of death, but this is a false
| dichotomy. It isn't (or at least shouldn't) be necessary to grow
| for a company to survive. If you are profitable, staying the same
| size is perfectly fine.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| The phrase usually used is a "leaky bucket". Sure a company can
| operate in a neutral space, but it's unlikely that overtime
| their revenue growth will match their customer churn.
|
| At the same time, a lack of growth limits how much can be
| invested on staying relevant in terms of R&D which further
| separates them from competitors with a positive growth
| trajectory.
|
| Its also incredibly hard to kickstart a growth engine once it
| has slowed down. The net result is a flywheel but in the
| opposite direction.
|
| PE buys companies like this to slow that negative growth
| flywheel down attempting to stay neutral until the investment
| is paid off at which point profit can be made.
|
| The long tail is massive attrition as well, because few people
| want to work at a sinking ship or rather a ship unwilling to
| invest internally.
|
| Neutral isn't bad, but it's very hard to exist.
| simonh wrote:
| If you're in a growing industry but you're not growing, then
| you're becoming less and less relevant to your potential and
| actual customers. In a business like their scale is crucial.
| It's not a stable situation to be in.
|
| Having said that they have been growing, their revenue is up,
| but so are their losses. They've just not managed to stay
| competitive.
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