On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 4:42 PM, John Plocher <john.ploc...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > 2010/8/20 Matthias Pfützner <matth...@pfuetzner.de> >> >> Let me add some numbers... >> ... >> that a high percentage might be working on Solaris might provide us with >> an >> approach to a number close to 1000 engineers... > > Of your 1000 engineers, maybe 100 were the senior leaders in innovation, > vision, drive and ability. At Sun, the makeup of that "club" was > exceedingly dynamic, to be sure, but it was a meritocracy - if you were > *good* and had job/product/whatever performance to prove it, membership was > open; nobody had to leave to make room for you. > > From what I have seen (and I have no visibility into the current numbers or > membership), a significant number of the distinguished engineers and fellows > that were there when Oracle took over have left. 30%? 50%? More? I don't > know either, but the Names that are making the headlines all come from that > small club... > > IM(ns)HO, losing that many top performing engineers to the competition will > do more to harm Oracle in both the short and long run than anything that > might conceivably happen due to "premature product and feature exposure" due > to open source community involvement. Nobody really cares if a company lays > off a bunch of its low level staff, but losing half of the technical > leadership of a technical company is a disaster. Oracle may have bought the > trademarks and rights to the code, but the real value of an acquisition is > in the minds of those who produced the products in the first place - long > term engineering excellence isn't a commodity that can be cheaply purchased > or easily duplicated. > > Don't forget that the easiest way to make the books look better in the short > term is to get rid of all those expensive engineers - you will immediately > see a 10%-15% rise in profitability because you no longer have to pay the > cost of development. Of course, after 24 to 36 months of coasting, you will > be dead, but given the Street's myopic focus and short term memory, who > cares? Just buy some other company and start everything over again...
Of course, acquisition as your growth strategy has yet to be shown to work in the long terms as well... _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
