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Love your customers

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: Love your customers

#31

Post by wmf »

musicale wrote: post #29
bcantrill wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Per above, it seems like Sun had a core architectural, technical, and engineering failure with SPARC failing to keep pace with x86, and a business failure dealing with the fallout: > 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 cont…

Sun being the leader in RISC-V systems

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.

Re: Love your customers

#32

Post by StellarScience »

Centigonal wrote: post #9

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…

> Companies that have disdain for their own customers ... do not endure in the limit.

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.

Re: Love your customers

#33

Post by bfrog »

It turns out that you don’t have to love your customers to make money. Abuse is the end state of most products once they’ve reached a point where there are few if any customers left to enthrall but still the world demands ever greater profit. VMware was and is there. Intel too actually.

Re: Love your customers

#34

Post by sxzygz »

Thank you Bryan for writing this. I’m not American, but the behaviour Bryan is calling out is in my opinion why American capitalism is in decline.

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.

Re: Love your customers

#35

Post by musicale »

wmf wrote: post #31
musicale wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per above, it seems like Sun had a core architectural, technical, and engineering failure with SPARC failing to keep pace with x86, and a business failure dealing with the fallout: > 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 cont…

Sun being the leader in RISC-V systems 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.

Well, RISC-V is likely easier to implement efficiently than SPARC (no register windows, etc.) and has many of the same RISC-derived advantages.

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.)

Re: Love your customers

#36

Post by eduction »

bcantrill wrote: post #24
eduction wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you act like he violated some high moral commandment by badmouthing a customer. Wasn’t Reuters a sun customer you badmouthed? Wasn’t oracle a sun customer? 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 badmouth…

Well, this wasn't badmouthing a customer -- it was showing contempt for customers , full stop. As for the accusations of hypocrisy: the example you picked (a deep cut!) was a Sun customer who insisted that we disable DTrace for their application so their customers (who were also Sun customers!) wouldn't be able to instrument the software that they had paid for. So ironically, I was in fact operating in defense of the…

We are back to where we started. When I said in my first message that you basically outed this person, you said it didn’t matter as the tone of the (hitherto private) exchange gave them away anyway. Now you move the goalposts back to the original position and claim you kept them anonymous.

Re: Love your customers

#37

Post by holden_nelson »

bcantrill wrote: post #16
eduction wrote: post #7

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.

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,…

Bryan, if I may ask, what was the purpose of this LinkedIn / blog post?

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.

Re: Love your customers

#38

Post by growse »

bcantrill wrote: post #24
eduction wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you act like he violated some high moral commandment by badmouthing a customer. Wasn’t Reuters a sun customer you badmouthed? Wasn’t oracle a sun customer? 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 badmouth…

Well, this wasn't badmouthing a customer -- it was showing contempt for customers , full stop. As for the accusations of hypocrisy: the example you picked (a deep cut!) was a Sun customer who insisted that we disable DTrace for their application so their customers (who were also Sun customers!) wouldn't be able to instrument the software that they had paid for. So ironically, I was in fact operating in defense of the…

> I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.

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!)

Re: Love your customers

#39

Post by cainxinth »

It’s uncommon to love your customer. Customers are demanding. Have you ever spoken with the locals in a resort town? Their economy depends on the tourists… who they generally loathe.

Re: Love your customers

#40

Post by lucasyvas »

cainxinth wrote: post #39

It’s uncommon to love your customer. Customers are demanding. Have you ever spoken with the locals in a resort town? Their economy depends on the tourists… who they generally loathe.

I also think love is the wrong word here.

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.

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