In the last year I was going through some old DOS documentation, and Microsoft's version that they based their entire business on isn't particularly good or sensibly designed. The thing which made it special is Gates The Destroyer actually cares about his nerd family sticking together like Battlestar Galactica, while a bunch of earlier hardware companies essentially exploited the fixed nature numerical assignment he gave them. The thing this meant is memory had to get larger on the PC to increase the addressable range, and then larger memory meant more spec for the machine, such as CPU and cache -- but at the end of it all none of the competitor machines held out with their neatly organised address maps, because they cared about products, not people. Almost like something OCP would say to Robocop? So it's an interesting question to say how or why we might value Microsoft.
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Gates also learned GE was trying to do too much.
"My second big takeaway from Lights Out is that GE didn't have the right talent and systems to bundle together a dizzying array of unrelated businesses—including moviemaking, insurance, plastics, and nuclear power plants—and manage them well," Gates writes.
"Investors bought into the notion that the company's world-renowned training made it better at managing things than anyone else, and that GE could produce consistent profits even in highly cyclical markets. And GE successfully persuaded people that its generalists could avoid the pitfalls that had tripped up big conglomerates in the past," Gates says. "In reality, those generalists often didn't understand the specifics of the industries they had to manage and couldn't navigate trends in their industries."
In reality, those generalists often didn’t understand the specifics of the industries they had to manage and couldn’t navigate trends in their industries. For example, the authors make the case that CEO Jeff Immelt didn’t have a good handle on its huge banking unit, GE Capital. “Making money from [GE Capital] seemed shockingly simple to him at first, as it had to Welch, but the balance sheets were treacherously complex, and deep risks lurked there and were not always easily spotted in the quarterly profits and losses,” write Gryta and Mann. One former GE executive told the authors that “Immelt struggled with basic concepts—the difference between secured and unsecured debt, for instance, which was fundamental to a lending operation like GE Capital.”
This dynamic was not confined to Immelt. It was rampant throughout the company’s top ranks. As a result, the ability of top executives to understand what was really going on was quite limited. The only people who could actually dig down into the numbers and see what was going on were in finance. And as I mentioned above, the finance people didn’t have much incentive to bring negative news to Welch or Immelt.Last edited by omgkenny; 08-07-2021, 10:31.
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BordersUp mods. Unite your mini mod lions to form one big mod lion.Last edited by fishbowlhead; 08-07-2021, 10:55.
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Maybe we should have a pet bot for the forum, muuuuum can we keep it?
Is it bad that i actually laughed at this, crippletron is now been saved for future use.
Originally posted by omgkenny View PostNow now gents. Don't make someone call up Crippletron.
(Hey Belinda wants to know which of them were squealers licklips. Erm.)Last edited by importaku; 08-07-2021, 10:44.
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