Story 1:
SCO is nearly dead, now filing for bankruptcy and it blames Linux for its demise. Story here
Story 2:
US automakers in shit, really deep one. Most jobs now go to Asia and South America. Story here.
What do the above stories have in common? What is the lesson?
Complacency kills
Look, SCO was the king in OS in 80's, at that time MS was a small company with MS DOS practically not usable. That was the heyday of SCO with most backbone computers running Unix. At that time, the open source projects didn't exist yet, and Richard Stallment was still hacking happily in the MIT AI lab.
The problem is SCO just has been sitting in its laurel for too long, oblivious to the ever changing world outside. The computing landscape is changing very rapidly, and an 'Internet year', is arguably much shorter than a dog year, let alone a normal calendar year. When SCO finally woke up, it already in shit. Game over.
How about US automakers? They are not dead yet, but they are beaten so hard that they have to cut costs and move to places with cheap labors to survive. For so long US cars have been producing bulky and fuel-inefficient vehicles, and then the gas was dirt cheap and there was no competition, so everything was rosy and glory. But when the underlying factors (i.e. cheap gas and no competition) changed, it was thrown in shit.
What struck me was the quote of Mark Fields, president of Ford's North and South American Operations, on the current situation:
'It's a manifestation of decisions made or not made years ago.'
What is the remedy? I have no ready answers for that, but Steve Job has a very thoughtful pointers here.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
2 comments:
Hmm.. For the US automobile companies, I don't think that they are in deep trouble. They are just cutting costs and going where it is more cost effective to manufacture.
They were just building what the American public were told they wanted. Bigger is better. Sort of a vicious cycle, I think. Suddenly, everybody was hit by the fact that oil is not infinite, excessive burning of fuel causes global warming, bigger is not better.
It'll probably take a generation to change the mindset of the people. Not just Americans are affected. People everywhere are told to spend, spend, spend. Maybe the rant is a little off topic but you understand. I hope. ;)
They are in deep shit, now toyota and even Hyundai are selling more than GM or Ford. In other words they are doing far worse off than they used to be. Ok, in relative terms they are in trouble. If the trend goes on, they will go bankrupt in not too far future.
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