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Love your customers

bcantrill.dtrace.org

41–45 of 45 posts

Re: Love your customers

#41

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.

This is the reverse situation.

Here the provider is being abused by the customer. Because of the nature of global travel, there is a race to the bottom phenomenon of what kind of tourist behaviour is tolerated. An old housemate of mine from university days, who runs a bicycle tour [1], makes his guests sign a document where they are made to explicitly acknowledge their role as travellers. The reward is a deep cultural intimacy.

This is why I use the term symbiosis in my comment further below. There is a relationship that needs to be understood by both parties and each has to have the resolve to not be exploitative nor to tolerate exploitation.

Speaking of that trip. I should go again. The food, oh man the food!

[1] https://www.southindiabicycleadventure.com/testamonials

Re: Love your customers

#42

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…

> 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.

Sparkling wine bottles are sometimes popped when the last installation of Oracle gets retired in an organization.

Re: Love your customers

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My intent at first was not to write about this, but I couldn't stop thinking about it: I was not only profoundly disappointed in my former colleague, but disgusted by the disdain towards VMware customers at Broadcom. I was earnest in that it brought a flood of memories back for me about how ashamed I was to (briefly) work at Oracle, and I did what I have always done when something is burning inside me: I spoke my heart.

I understand that you are concerned about my former colleague (though again, a little hard to say that I'm putting them "on blast" when they are unnamed!), but my sympathies lie not with Broadcom but with the customers that they are screwing over: I have heard many, many stories from VMware customers being taken aback by the audacious things that Broadcom has told them -- the kinds of things that even Oracle has the decency to not say out loud. These customers don't speak publicly (for understandable reasons!), leaving no one to speak for them.

So yes, a Broadcom employee shooting their mouth off in an unsolicited conversation with me about their contempt for their own customers shouldn't assume that their disposition will be kept in confidence -- especially when it tracks with so much bad behavior out there!

Re: Love your customers

#44
A little hungover, but some foggy thoughts: If a company can differentiate itself by loving its customers, then that is an indictment of the rest of the entire industry. Loving one's customers should be the standard. But alas, the people with their hands on the money-faucet tend reward profitable (zero-sum) behavior over virtuous (positive-sum) behavior. One can only hope that after they alienate enough of the population, they will run into problems that they cannot buy their way out of (so that they can learn what it feels like when those-who-cannot are at the mercy of those-who-can).

Re: Love your customers

#45

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…

Given how Fujitsu was able to make competitive SPPARC64 models for Oracle, it was unlikely to be an ISA issue, and more a design and manufacturing issue....
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