Absolutely great story- Elon not being held hostage and accepting fear from IT professionals

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Number_35 said:
I got thrown into the deep end at work back in '98, tasked with using SAP (which my company had recently started using) to order material for a big fibre build.

I made many mistakes, learned a lot in a hurry, and became the department go-to guy w.r.t. SAP. Before I left in 2018 I prepared how-to procedures that real people could understand.

One vendor said SAP stood for Stop All Purchases, but I grew to really appreciate how powerful it really was.
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SAP is 1980's architecture. Is it powerful? Sure but it is freakin' expensive, slow and difficult to maintain and change, mistake prone.
I wrote a small interface app (basically a simple workflow) in Visual Studio/SQL Server that called a BAPI for SAP material data. It was used for an engineering support group of about 10 people. I wrote and implemented it in 1 day. The team loved it; it ran every day generating hundreds of transactions. Simple reporting and exports were built in. After a couple of years IT management decided to code it in ABAP. It took a team 1 year to implement. The users hated the interface and wanted my routine back. And it had less functionality than my chump change little app.
 
Number_35 said:
I got thrown into the deep end at work back in '98, tasked with using SAP (which my company had recently started using) to order material for a big fibre build.

I made many mistakes, learned a lot in a hurry, and became the department go-to guy w.r.t. SAP. Before I left in 2018 I prepared how-to procedures that real people could understand.

One vendor said SAP stood for Stop All Purchases, but I grew to really appreciate how powerful it really was.
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Me too! We had a great system where I worked. When things were slow and I was not on my tools I was made to order parts and plan repair jobs, enter data. I scanned repair manuals with equipment drawings / ID numbers / parts locations etc.... for mechanics to print out to use for each job. The company sent-forced me to SAP to evaluate it. I came back and told them SAP was like going back to the stone ages compared to system we used since 1990. They told me "Keep that to yourself. Sorry... we being forced by corporate to switch over anyway. You get all of our data transfered into SAP asap!" To me it stood for Stop All Progress. I retired shortly after they forced it on us so I never got to use it much at all. Before, we had an information storage system + an auto work scheduler for pulling up repair jobs by hours times number of mechanics each day. I saw nothing like that in SAP. To me it seemed to be just a very huge purchasing & selling logistic system that tied many businesses together. Maybe it is great now?
 
SammyChevelleTypeS3 said:
Me too! We had a great system where I worked. When things were slow and I was not on my tools I was made to order parts and plan repair jobs, enter data. I scanned repair manuals with equipment drawings / ID numbers / parts locations etc.... for mechanics to print out to use for each job. The company sent-forced me to SAP to evaluate it. I came back and told them SAP was like going back to the stone ages compared to system we used since 1990. They told me "Keep that to yourself. Sorry... we being forced by corporate to switch over anyway. You get all of our data transfered into SAP asap!" To me it stood for Stop All Progress. I retired shortly after they forced it on us so I never got to use it much at all. Before, we had an information storage system + an auto work scheduler for pulling up repair jobs by hours times number of mechanics each day. I saw nothing like that in SAP. To me it seemed to be just a very huge purchasing & selling logistic system that tied many businesses together. Maybe it is great now?
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Maybe SAP is better now, but it's in the rearview mirror for me. Can't say I miss it!

Regarding being forced to abandon an older system that worked well, a year or so later the company forced us to move away from the excellent and intuitive Corel WordPerfect and use MS Word instead. GRRR!
 
Number_35 said:
Maybe SAP is better now, but it's in the rearview mirror for me. Can't say I miss it!

Regarding being forced to abandon an older system that worked well, a year or so later the company forced us to move away from the excellent and intuitive Corel WordPerfect and use MS Word instead. GRRR!
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Kind of hard to stay in business when Corel Wordperfect and Lotus 123 had license validations on their software. The genius Bill Gates purposely left off license validations, encouraging the illegal use and spread of MSFT applications. Once everyone was hooked on the pirated MSFT applications, and Wordperfect and 123 no longer had critical mass marketshare- Bill Gates went back and started lawsuits for use of MSFT applications. From local libraries to small to large businesses, Bill Gates ran MSFT like a addictive drug, indirectly give it away for free, and continue to give it away for free, then put the screw to the users.

Bill Gates was a genius at beating major players with deep pockets and better products......
 
GON said:
Kind of hard to stay in business when Corel Wordperfect and Lotus 123 had license validations on their software. The genius Bill Gates purposely left off license validations, encouraging the illegal use and spread of MSFT applications. Once everyone was hooked on the pirated MSFT applications, and Wordperfect and 123 no longer had critical mass marketshare- Bill Gates went back and started lawsuits for use of MSFT applications. From local libraries to small to large businesses, Bill Gates ran MSFT like a addictive drug, indirectly give it away for free, and continue to give it away for free, then put the screw to the users.

Bill Gates was a genius at beating major players with deep pockets and better products......
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That's a good summary - and sadly quite accurate.
 
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GON said:
One (formally) very successful West Point graduate and one time successful businessman that was hated, but did very well was "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. AL was a much hated businessman that most considered a exploiter. After years of success, AL began listening to his critics to improve his image, and ended up being charged with a lot of civil and maybe criminal activities in his business practices. Had he just "kept the path" and not listen to his critics, he likely would never have been involved in "cooking the books" and actions to improve his image, which was his downfall, and he fell hard.
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My brain is trying to unpack this.

1974-1976 - Fraud at a paper mill in Niagra Falls
3 other CEO Jobs in the intervening years until taking over Sunbeam in 1996 - One at Scott paper who alleged fraud long after.
Sunbeam had to restate earnings many times from 1996 onward ending in bankruptcy for the company and suits against Dunlap.

I don't see how he was trying to improve his image in any way except by committing fraud to make it look like he was a better leader than he was.

It looks like he was a fraudster from beginning to end.
 
ctechbob said:
My brain is trying to unpack this.

1974-1976 - Fraud at a paper mill in Niagra Falls
3 other CEO Jobs in the intervening years until taking over Sunbeam in 1996 - One at Scott paper who alleged fraud long after.
Sunbeam had to restate earnings many times from 1996 onward ending in bankruptcy for the company and suits against Dunlap.

I don't see how he was trying to improve his image in any way except by committing fraud to make it look like he was a better leader than he was.

It looks like he was a fraudster from beginning to end.
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Thanks for pointing out the Nigara Falls fraud- that is the first I have read of it, and have read numerous stories on Al Dunlap.
 
GON said:
Thanks for pointing out the Nigara Falls fraud- that is the first I have read of it, and have read numerous stories on Al Dunlap.
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I did the quick and dirty and read the Wikipedia article just to get a grasp of the basics since I'd never heard of him. Didn't really do a lot of research on it, so it could well be wrong, but I'd say that entry is overwhelmingly negative about him.
 
Typical story of how the man operates.

Yes it worked this time, but the guy has a nasty habit of turning into a giant baby and saying "we're going to do it or else" when someone tells him no, no matter the fact that it's a bad idea. This entire story reads like a child saying "I'm going to do it anyway whether you like it or not" and it mentions but conveniently glosses over all the data privacy laws that were broken in doing this. Just another day in the life of fElon Musk...

BTW, this kind of "I know it all" attitude from someone who does things like blow up a launchpad(in a protected area) and rocket rushing to launch a rocket on 4/20 when EVERYONE inside and outside who understands anything about this considered it an entirely predicable outcome. This is coming from someone who has repeadedly lied about self-driving capabilities of his vehicles continues to miss the promised timeline by, what is it, 5 years now? and far from making it work continues crippling the vehicles(even removing hardware in older ones when in for service, and disabling for everything via software update) like ultrasonic and LIDAR that is widely considered to be the way forward to achieve any semblance of self driving. No, man-child decided it's going to only work with cameras, so despite insistence otherwise that's how it's going to happen(or rather not happen given his track record in this area).

BTW, this man-child is often compared to Steve Jobs. I'm sure Steve Jobs was not a particularly pleasant person to work for, and I wouldn't have wanted to. With that said, rarely did 97-2012 Steve Jobs Apple announce a product that wasn't essentially ready to go and actually did everything that it claimed to do. That corporate culture is still around. If something isn't announced "shipping today" normally the timeline is something like "shipping in 2 weeks" or "shipping in a month" and they actually hold that. A few Steve Jobs obsessive design failures like the Cube did actually make it to production(BTW, the engineers snuck a fan mount in the bottom of it because they knew passive cooling woudn't work if they moved anywhere beyond the initial shipping configurations), but for the most part he was at least smart enough to listen to his engineers(note-Elon Musk is NOT an engineer, despite fancying himself one) who knew the stuff and could be convinced that something was a bad idea and not do it. There have been a few "bad" Apple products over the years, but it's few and far between, and even big things like the iPhone 4 antenna issue they managed an immediate fix(free cases). I see little resemblance between them, to be honest.

If the cult of personality around man-child Musk didn't exist, the man would not be successful...
 
SammyChevelleTypeS3 said:
Ford's own family had great issues with the old man. Especially as he grew older and was forced to release some of his power to his son Edsel Ford who actually created Lincoln / Mercury and other great modern inventions at Ford.
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Yup, there was an interesting history of the Ford family a few years ago. I read a history of the Kennedys around the same time. It was a bit of a coin toss morally.

There was an interesting article a few years ago - it's well-known that Henry Ford had his dealers display pro-Nazi literature in their showrooms, and had a strong anti-semitic bias. However, and this was new to me, "Henry the Deuce" (Henry Ford II, the grandson) had Ford supply much aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.

It does sound like Edsel, Henry's son, was a good man. It's too bad we remember him for the car named after him.
 
also sounds like Elon might be engaging in Foreign Policy with Putin and company, based on the latest thing from the WSJ... and others, which is just starting to get some play in th emedia.. so is he guilty of aiding and abetting a foreign government, against the viewpoint of the US Government?
 
MSCH said:
also sounds like Elon might be engaging in Foreign Policy with Putin and company, based on the latest thing from the WSJ... and others, which is just starting to get some play in th emedia.. so is he guilty of aiding and abetting a foreign government, against the viewpoint of the US Government?
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There are always two sides to every story, and the truth is almost always somehwere in between. Which side of the story did you get?
 
Elon pros: hard worker, creates jobs, forward thinking.
Elon cons: says a lot of stupid things, acts a bit juvenile. Not quite the genius people think he is.

That's my thoughts on this guy.
 
What Musk was doing was trying to break the paralysis that happens during decisions and processes.

Case in point: years ago we had a flood event near my previous home that took out a highway bridge over a river. This was a simple bridge, maybe 100 feet and two lanes. The loss of the bridge created a long detour of around twenty miles or so for everyone. Months went by and finally the state announced plans for a new bridge. This required study after study. Meanwhile students had to take that long detour.

A engineer noted that an old railroad trestle adjacent to the washed out bridge was in good shape and within a couple of months a temporary travel point was created. Temporary stop lights at each end plus roadways were made so school buses could travel over the trestle.

Meanwhile years went by before the state finally got going on the bridge. The actual bridge construction took just a few months as it was prefabricated at a plant in Tacoma and hauled in. All the planning and such beforehand took almost five years.
 
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