On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, John Ruschmeyer wrote:
> <soapbox>
> It never ceases to amaze and confuse me how such product information
> can totally disappear, particularly in a buyout. Presumably, Intel bought
> Dayna for some reason; I would have assumed it was for Dayna's intellectual
> property. Obviously, though, that can't be the case... :-(
> </soapbox>
Believe me, its easy. Let me demonstrate how it can happen.
My company was recently bought out. I was sole keeper of the
"Intellectual Property" (i.e. source code). When the company was
purchased, the only thing the buyers wanted to see as proof that our
product existed was a directory listing of the source code files. For
reasons irrelevant to this thread, I never produced the actual source
code. I've held onto it. At one point I was asked to submit a copy to
someone in the new entity, which I did. It sat undisturbed on the server
I uploaded it to. Months later, after the person I'd submitted it to was
long gone, when it really counted and the corporate brass wanted a copy,
they knew nothing about the copy I'd loaded onto the server (I later
deleted it).
One of my programmer's was working on an updated version of our primary
product. She finished it, archived the source code and supporting
documentation onto a Syquest disk (uh oh :) and packaged everything up and
shipped it to the corporate office when our office was closed down. She's
since left the company and moved out of state. If anyone at corporate
ever asked where this source code was they would never find it. I'm the
only link to it, but I won't be around forever. As far as they know, a
project that consumed 2.5 years and at least $300,000 does not even exist.
It's all but lost at this point.
So Dayna obviously had something Intel wanted, but apparently it wasn't
for their I.P.
This goes back to the same issue as how a company can lose the source code
to a program they use on a continual basis. If you've never worked for a
large corporation then its hard to comprehend how intellectual property
can be lost. But believe me, it happens all the time in buyouts and
mergers. The guys doing the buying have all the money in the world but no
technical knowledge whatsoever. They are buying a big black box that
contains all sorts of things. They're usually after just one specific
thing in that black box (either one particular product, customers,
patents, etc) but they have no specific knowledge of what else is in that
box, and they don't care. After the merger, the people who knew what was
going on are either downsized or they leave, and the knowledge they had of
what was inside the black box goes with them. So your favorite software
tool or whatever suddenly becomes unsupported. Or in the extreme case,
extinct.
And its not just the untangible that gets lost. Even tangible things get
lost. Items get stuffed away in closets or storage rooms somewhere in the
building and are forgotten about. Large items. Big mini-computers for
instance. 10 or 20 years later , after several maganement changes, that
room is opened like an ancient tomb and cleared out to make way for new
office space or whatnot. Trust me. It happens. As stupid as it sounds,
it happens.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Thu Nov 19 1998 - 01:23:50 GMT