[HN Gopher] The Inner Osborne Effect (2021) ___________________________________________________________________ The Inner Osborne Effect (2021) Author : luu Score : 102 points Date : 2022-08-15 23:43 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (raganwald.com) (TXT) w3m dump (raganwald.com) | pram wrote: | Yeah this happened at Atlassian, beat for beat. Textbook | incompetence. | | HipChat was a declining dumpster fire with endless outages, so | they thought they'd make a new chat platform from scratch | (Stride) | | So all the development effort was on Stride from that point. It | was released, no one used it, and then under a year later it was | shitcanned and "sold" to Slack. The dev team was RIF'd. Good | shit! | cestith wrote: | Did a similar thing happen (minus the new product going away) | in the Stash to Bitbucket transition? I also wonder how many | people are not moving to Bitbucket Cloud when Server and Data | Center are discontinued. Gitlab is still available to be self- | hosted with full support. | nonrandomstring wrote: | A most interesting read. Never heard of this effect. It makes | sense. Maybe caught a whiff of it in some organisations. In | highly compartmentalised setups you sometimes feel that another | team is working directly against you. There's also the kind of | anti-engineering, where one team builds a product while another | within the same organisation try to break it. For example: one | team is trying to make a great UI while the ad-revenue or DRM | crew are screwing up the user experience sticking their oar in. | These are the sort of things that lead to a feeling of betrayal, | or that your team is second best. Making grand announcements that | "soon everything will change" or that some hitherto secret | product will upstage everything else is bound to be unsettling. | If it's a secret, keep your mouth shut and quit posturing to your | own congregation. | realo wrote: | Ah yes... I have seen something like that in a previous place I | worked. | | One team was building a gizmo that could detect the difference | between the exhaust of a fighter jet engine and the deployed | countermeasures (for a missile, say). | | Another team was working on countermeasures that could fool the | first team's gizmo. | | Fun times... | nonrandomstring wrote: | > countermeasures that could fool the first team's gizmo | | And on paper, what an economy! Where else would you find | engineers with the expert knowledge better placed to defeat | your own toys :) fubar, what a show :) | neves wrote: | The company is Netscape, right? | sharmin123 wrote: | khazhoux wrote: | ...and then the current team is told they will focus on | maintaining the "Legacy Platform" meanwhile the new team who has | done jack shit gets 3 years to underdeliver, all the while being | the golden children at the front of every line. The Legacy Team | gets undermined and disrespected at every executive review, | despite the fact that the entire company or program depends on | them, either as infrastructure or to generate actual, you know, | revenue. | | Oh, and after 3 years, the V2 Team will fail but simply move on | to another project or company, with no accountability. | | Yeah, this sounds familiar :-) | __derek__ wrote: | A related rule I've learned: when someone says that they're going | to introduce a new design system (which will fix _all_ of the | problems caused by the _legacy_ one), run. | darren wrote: | Related evergreen post from Joel Spolksy: | https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... | gibolt wrote: | The unspoken highlight of this is "don't piss off your team". | | Are people unhappy? Don't work against them with another 'hidden' | team. Fix the problem they keep complaining about. | | If a big challenge is coming up, don't alienate the people who | will be getting you through that challenge. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | > only once--to my knowledge--made the grevious mistake of | inflicting the Inner Osborne Effect on itself. | | They gimped the IIgs with a lower clock rate than possible to | avoid cannibalizing Macintosh. It outclassed the contemporary Mac | in a number of ways. | tomkaos wrote: | A manager start to tell everybody that we will get rip off our | "old obsolete" report tool without any project, budget or | research to find a replacement. We convince him to keep the tool, | but the damage was done. Project, training of user, development.. | everything start to stall because nobody want to work with | something that will be replace. 4 years later we still have to | tell people that this is still the tool to use, but everybody | just think it obsolete. | ineptech wrote: | This reminds me of an experience with a former employer. Company | A, heavy users of Salesforce, was acquired by company B, which | was married to M$ Dynamics. On the day of the announcement, one | of the bullet points was something like, "the new division will | transition from Salesforce to Dynamics over the next three | years." | | I think it took three _weeks_ for all of the Salesforce admins | and most of the devs to quit. They had to hire a small army of | contractors just to keep things running, and last I heard, the | parent company ended up switching to Salesforce anyway. All they | had to do was say, "We don't know what we're going to do yet," | which besides saving them tons of money would've been literally | true as well. | _jal wrote: | I've seen that sort of strategic ambiguity used to try to have | your people and your decision too. | | It may work for a little while, but generally you're going to | be left with the people who are young, naive or trapped. One of | the problems with hiring smart people is that they don't stop | being smart when you're trying to manipulate them. | numlock86 wrote: | > M$ | | What? | paulryanrogers wrote: | Microsoft | icedchai wrote: | No one in their right mind would move from Salesforce to | Dynamics. Both the UI and APIs pale in comparison to | Salesforce. | a_c wrote: | On the flip side, there are companies unwilling to cannibalize | themselves ended up having their market share gobble up by | competitors. It is a fine line to navigate | retrac wrote: | > Apple III and Lisa failed. Macintosh was underpowered and | overpriced on launch. But Apple continued to invest in Apple II, | which financed investing in Macintosh | | Apple barely scraped through the Apple III + Lisa debacle. The | Apple III was itself supposed to be the conservative product line | that would fund the Lisa and other advanced development. They | even added hardware to prevent accessing its extended memory and | etc. from Apple II emulation mode; they didn't want developers | targeting both platforms. The Apple II was put on the back | burner. It wasn't going to get the new OS for the Apple III, for | example, even though it could support it. (It did eventually get | it, as ProDOS.) | | Development of the Apple III started in '78 around the time the | Apple II+ came out. The Apple III came out in 1980 as a massive | flop. The Apple III+ came out late the next year as another flop. | Around then, the Apple //e was started in late 1981 as a rather | rushed effort to expand the Apple II line, which by then had been | completely stagnant since the release of the Disk II drive more | than 3 years before, during a rapidly evolving time in the | microcomputer market (the IBM PC had just been released). If they | had just released a straightforward upgrade to the Apple II+ | around ~1980, instead of the overengineered Apple III, they might | have been the IBM of the industry. | cestith wrote: | The IIgs was also a different platform from either the II, the | III, or the Macintosh. It wasn't released until two years after | the Mac. It outsold the Mac for a while, but the high price put | it well above the price of an Amiga before it was retired. | icedchai wrote: | I wanted a IIgs for a while, but a BBSer convinced me the | Amiga was a much better machine (also wayyyy cheaper.) The | difference in price between an Amiga 500 and an Apple IIgs | was insane. And the Amiga 500 could emulate a Mac! | a4isms wrote: | Author here. I remember the Apple III well, we nearly bought | one for my mother's Real Estate brokerage. Ended up with a | fairly vanilla Intel-based PC. | | Whew! | | But thank you for the correction on "Apple continued to | invest..." ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-17 23:00 UTC)