• From: "Andrew S. Townley" <ast@a...>
• To: Michael Kay <mike@s...>
• Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:49:30 +0000

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 13:38, Michael Kay wrote:
> > I accept that one wants to find out what the bottlenecks are, 
> > but I can't accept that companies this big spending this much 
> > money haven't.
> 
> Informix bankrupted itself buying Illustra at a price that most people
> thought was plain silly.

Not really.  Buying Illustra at that time was the right thing to do, but
the problem was the way the business was being run at the time.  Buying
companies and then ending up having their executive management calling
the shots after a short period of time isn't exactly a recipe for
success; neither is cooking the books.  Neither of these things were
related to paying a bunch of money to get Stonebreaker as a CTO and
access to working technology you could adapt to your product lines.

I'm sure IBM is pretty glad they did it, plus it tied up that nasty
lawsuit about who copied ideas from whom when their chief architects
were all Stonebreaker's students and presenting to each other on a
regular basis.

Still, you're right about the second part...

ast
-- 
Andrew S. Townley <ast@a...>
http://atownley.org

• References:
  • RE: No XML Binaries? Buy Hardware
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>