Some middle manager at Sun posted some "comedy" on a mythical contest between their access manager and Ping's products. It started off funny, but instead of knowing when to quit they took several cheap shots at Ping. Key takeaways from this comedic excursion include:
1) Sun has 35,000 employees
2) Sun is larger than Ping
3) In the Sun PM's view being able to deploy federation quickly is just "marketing"
So with these three lessons learned, you can kind of figure out how we got here to the point where a PM of a 35,000 person company has nothing better to do than broadcast cheapshots. My guess is that the PM has been in bakeoffs and lost to Ping many times, and sort of feels like "Hey, don't you know who I am? I am Gumby dammit!"
Over the last few decades, you would be hard pressed to find a company with a better track record of innovation than Sun. I imagine there were similar conversations and accusations in the halls of Armonk, NY in the 1980s. "we're IBM dammit! Who the heck are these little Unix startup companies?!? When these "toy" Unix machines who couldn't possibly deliver the things mainframes could started winning deals, the mid level PHBs (in between golf and puffs of cigars) started to take notice (sadly they had no Youtube back in the day) and talk about all the things the mainframes did but the Unix machines couldn't.
Why did Sun win in those days? Turns out customers didn't care that IBM was bigger, but which solution solved their problems.
Here is the thing that IBM eventually learned, but seems to elude some levels of management in Sun - you need to talk to your customer and LISTEN TO THEM. It doesn't matter how many employees *you* have, it matters what *they* (your customer) want.
Internally focused thinking (how many power points can 35,000 people turn out anyhow? wait don't answer that) doesn't mean anything - its all chrome and tailfins - doesn't amount to a hill of beans if what you create doesn't match what the customer wants.
As someone who actually has to deploy the stuff companies churn out, I am continually frustrated by bloated packages that supposedly "do everything", but are actually just the result of a bunch of internally focused, big company whiteboard sessions. I have blogged on the importance of listening to your customer and engineering security products so they can be deployed to solve problems in the real world. The fact that some big company PM thinks these concerns are joke and not MISSION CRITICAL says everything about them and nothing about the problem space we inhabit. You can make movies about your internally focused Dunder Mifflin Infinity-esque campaigns, or you can leave the cozy confines of the corporate HQ and listen to what your customers are trying to do.
To wit:
Dear Sun *.AccessMgmtPM,
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
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