Several months ago, I was on a social call with a few of my colleagues. We were talking about how our flagship product is really outdated but we had been working on a replacement for around 4 years without success. Therefore, the future looks bleak.
I made the point that if our rivals release their new software before we do, then we could be in serious trouble.
A colleague, Robin, agreed with me and stated:
“the only way we can stay in business is to rely on our competitors being worse than us”
Then added:
“we are Yahoo, waiting for Google to turn up”
Robin
I think the comparison is that Yahoo were quite a well-known search engine, but they didn’t build on what they had. So then Google came into the market with their superior search engine and not only took their market share, but then released products like Gmail which made Yahoo even more redundant. Yahoo ended up abandoning their own Search feature and used Google’s instead. Today, it seems they use Bing.
I’m not sure we would have the same opportunity just to back off and utilise our competitor’s features.
Robin then elaborated:
We have lost a lot of expertise over the years, so there’s large parts of our software we don’t truly understand. It’s essentially falling apart at this stage. We need to retire it. The sheer amount of technical debt is so bad that fixing technical debt is stymied by how much technical debt there is.
Robin
Shortly after, an American company placed a bid at a hefty 50% increase on share price. It was quickly accepted by the board who will be cashing in for millions.
“This is exciting for us. This is in recognition of the brilliant work we have achieved together in the past few years. It’s a recognition of success. This is about future growth, with potentially a new shareholder who can drive innovation, great service for our customers, and take us to the next stage. We believe this combination will have the resources and expertise to enable us to better support our users through technology innovations. Our long standing track record of delivering effective technology solutions and strong financial and operating performance combined with our partner Group’s resources and expertise will enable us to accelerate our development. We therefore consider that the combined group will be well positioned to serve its customers and partners in the UK, whilst ensuring we remain a strong organisation through technology innovation.”
Director’s corporate-jargon-riddled waffle.
A further update from the director’s was aimed to allay our fears of redundancy or general change to how we work. It was also full of the usual corporate jargon:
- great for everyone, the employees, customers, the shareholders
- Accelerating investment
- redundancies: “Absolutely not the case. This is about growth.
- genuinely really excited for this. Excited about the opportunities for individuals
- Excited about the positive synergies between the two businesses
- accelerate in research
- “don’t worry because it’s going to be absolutely EPIC!”
- Continue personal journey
- accelerate our strategy, accelerate our roadmap, accelerate our customer base
- gives our colleagues something to really relish
- gunning for growth and innovation for some time. Completely in alignment with the direction we set.
- no plan to change what we are doing in UK or India
- unique culture that we will maintain and build upon
- Benefits and conditions will remain (pensions safeguarded)
“clearly, what we are focusing on now, is making sure we complete the year”
At the end of the update, our CEO came out with this ominous statement
We are actually highly profitable (somehow), but that made it sound like we were struggling. Is there any doubt we will not see out the year?
I didn’t find many comments from our users posted on the internet, but a small group seemed to be concerned that our data would be owned by an American company. I think for the most part, and especially with our main software, we don’t actually own the data. Our users own the data and we are mainly the “data processor”. So if the American company wanted to buy us to get their hands on our data, then I reckon they would be doing illegal things, so that’s not a worry. I think it is merely a case of the American company wanting a profitable company and to get into the sector. They might be shocked when they find out our current software is really retro without much scope for growth, and the replacement is in “development hell”, and not worth the hype we gave it.
One user was saying that because the idea of Americans owning our data was “unethical”, they wanted to build their own system which would be ethical and not-for-profit. I did wonder if an open-source project could work – our system has essentially been built by hundreds of developers over 15 years. With hindsight, you could build something similar much quicker, especially if you focus on the core features. However, the architecture is a massive problem and costs loads to run. It would take at least 5 years before you had enough features to get users to switch to your system. Then it would still need to be funded to keep running. I think even the big open source projects have salaried software engineers because you cannot just rely on ad-hoc contributions.
Like I said, we have struggled to build our own replacement which is in “development hell”. That’s with full-time staff and loads of managers to coordinate it. Then we were talking about trialling a version which is basically just an RSS feed after hyping it up 4 years ago.
I was discussing this conversation with one of our Software Architects, and he said the open source idea could only feasibly work if an existing company like ours made our product’s code open source; so it was already complete and the architecture was in place. Then the contributions would be to add features, and make it more performant.
“Well, they certainly can’t make them any worse! That wheel of death that says ‘loading’ just goes round and round forever!
A user on the takeover, and our software’s recent performance issues
Back to the takeover, it will be interesting when/if the takeover fully completes to see what the American company plans to do with us. I’m intrigued if our Director’s statements have any truth.
Note: I stole the blog’s title from the Fall Out Boy song “The Take Over, The Breaks Over”
Stranger Coding Tings 