[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[JF Mezei]

Am in the process of reading the "Book of Jobs", being a good member of
the Church of Apple :-)

In it, there is a very telling passage that compares Apple with Sony and
why Apple was able to kill the walkman.


Sony had all the ingredients, the sleek designs for hardware, the music,
 record label, the distribution etc. But it failed. But it was organised
into divisions. And this was telling to Jobs "divisions". It divides a
company.

And because each division had its own requiremenet to be profitable, the
record labels didn't want to play ball with the electronics to
cannabilise their own business to let digital downloads.

Apple, with its own "special" CEO and a single P&L for all of the
company was able and willing to cannabalise sales of one thing to get
another thing because they coudl see the "big picture".


Reading that passage reminded me of Digital. In its heydays, it had all
the components, hardware, OS, applications, database, support etc and
Olsen saw to it that they worked. He knew that compiler folks were
needed to support the whole platform and developpers etc.

Then came Palmer who organised everything into divisions which had to be
profitable and then you got lack of vision and stuff got canned left and
right.


Of course, Digital was always affraid that a new product would
cannabalise an older/bigger one, so it would put epoxy into a Bi-Bus to
 castrate a machine to prevent it from competing against a more
expensive one.


What Steve Jobs said was quite telling: If you're not willing to
cannabalise your own products when creating a new one, someone else will
cannabalise it for you.  Looks like Sun cannabalised a lot fo DEC sales
back in late 1980s.