[HN Gopher] Love your customers
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Love your customers
Author : chmaynard
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-12-31 21:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bcantrill.dtrace.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bcantrill.dtrace.org)
| vintagevibe wrote:
| Odd framing for the opposite of "holding customers hostage" - I
| don't think people want or need to be loved by their enterprise
| software.
| joa- wrote:
| I don't think they are looking to date eachother. I think
| rather what they mean is:
|
| 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.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| > I don't think people want or need to be loved by their
| enterprise software.
|
| 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
| Herring wrote:
| I like the sentiment, I really do, but enshittification is a
| civilization-wide problem. It's not solved by asking corporations
| to be nicer.
| themafia wrote:
| Enshittification is recognizing the symptom and not the
| disease. If the market functioned I could just not do business
| with these companies or buy their products. Since many sectors
| of the US economy are nearly fully monopolized I don't have
| this choice. So the "enshittification" continues.
| adeeb39 wrote:
| Nice
| eduction wrote:
| I admire Bryan and Oxide but outing your former coworker's
| private conversation with you because they said something you
| didn't like on email is, to use Bryan's terminology, "gross."
|
| How many former Sun folks are in senior engineering management at
| Broadcom? Might as well have just posted the person's name.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| I dunno, a few hundred folks?
| margalabargala wrote:
| I would be shocked if the number of former Sun people who
| then worked at VMware and now are in senior engineering
| management at Broadcom was as high as five.
| bcantrill wrote:
| The name is beside the point -- and their character outs them
| anyway. To be clear, this was a conversation I didn't initiate
| (they came into my DMs, going off half-cocked about several
| technical aspects of Oxide that they did not understand), and
| they made no effort to hide their disposition. We probably
| disagree on this, but I don't believe that there's a basis for
| an assumption of privacy here (I'm not your priest, rabbi,
| lawyer, spouse, etc.) -- and anyone who knows me would know
| that I'm not the person to be confessing these kinds of sins to
| anyway.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Love you Bryan, but:
|
| _> 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.
| mustache_kimono wrote:
| The next sentence is more defensible:
|
| >> _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.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I think that companies like Oracle and Broadcom begin to
| resemble specialized private equity firms: they acquire
| innovative companies that have scaled to a level that they're
| familiar with. The acquirer then enforces "business
| discipline" and unlocks efficiencies (mainly this means
| leveraging the acquirer's existing connections with their
| customer base to cross-sell licenses, raising prices to the
| highest possible level their customers can sustain, and
| laying off/transferring redundant positions or positions not
| directly tied to revenue generation). This lasts 3-10 years
| until the market develops a lower-cost enterprise-ready
| alternative that starts to erode the captive customer base,
| but in that time these companies have collected enough rents
| to acquire another set of smaller companies and repeat the
| process.
| mustache_kimono wrote:
| > I think that companies like Oracle, SAP, and Broadcom
| begin to resemble specialized private equity firms
|
| 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.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with all of that. Extractive behemoths like
| Oracle couldn't exist without innovators like Oxide
| (well, not exactly Oxide since I doubt they'd sell to an
| Oracle, but you know what I mean).
|
| 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?"
| baxtr wrote:
| No love for customers will compensate for a missing strategic
| moat. Sun placed its hopes on vertically integrated hardware +
| proprietary OS. Oracle bet on software, that once installed,
| had extremely high switching costs (similar to SAP). Strategy
| >> Love.
| bcantrill wrote:
| Appreciate the love, but I think you are drawing the wrong
| conclusion here: Sun failed to endure not because it loved its
| customers, but to the contrary because it lost track of them:
| the company was disinterested in the mechanics of running a
| business.[0]
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
| themafia wrote:
| > Oracle has endured nearly 50 years.
|
| CIA contractors be like that sometimes.
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