Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Love your customers

bcantrill.dtrace.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Love your customers

#11

Post by baxtr »

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…

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.

Re: Love your customers

#12

Post by Centigonal »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #10
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…

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 (th…

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.

Re: Love your customers

#13

Post by mustache_kimono »

Centigonal wrote: post #12
mustache_kimono wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (th…

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 le…

> 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.

Re: Love your customers

#14

Post by margalabargala »

thundergolfer wrote: post #8
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.

I dunno, a few hundred folks?

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.

Re: Love your customers

#15

Post by Centigonal »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #13
Centigonal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

> 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 maxi…

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?"

Re: Love your customers

#16

Post by bcantrill »

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, 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.

Re: Love your customers

#17

Post by bcantrill »

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…

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

Re: Love your customers

#18

Post by themafia »

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…

> Oracle has endured nearly 50 years.

CIA contractors be like that sometimes.

Re: Love your customers

#19

Post by themafia »

Herring wrote: post #5

I like the sentiment, I really do, but enshittification is a civilization-wide problem. It’s not solved by asking corporations to be nicer.

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.

Re: Love your customers

#20

Post by throwmeaway-x1 »

I work in infrastructure at one of the players in the lawsuits, I won't mention which one. Make no mistake, we are moving out of broadcom. We're not crawling back. There is enough technical skills to maneuver large infrastructure projects and cloud engineering. Our exit strategy began over a year and half ago. In hindsight it should have begun 8 years earlier after similar pricing issues with Wiley Introscope (which broadcom also acquired). But better late than never.
Post reply on HN