Money Talks !

A story - betaal was telling to Vicky ! About setting priorities around money, and misplaced priorities.

Once there was a high tech company. Small and nimble. High on innovation - in productions, pricing, positioning and packaging ! A true Engineering and Sales driven company.

They produced hardware and sold them. Now, every hardware sold went with software, which was never sold separately. But half of the development cost was in software. Then enabling services on the platforms (Hardware PLUS software), was through partners or through education directly to the customer.

Then the company grew. Some wise brains thought of a silo called "services". To recover the money for the software and services on the HW the company built. Very good business idea.

One hole in execution though !

The so called new Silo, "Services" did not have expertise to provide the services customer wanted. That expertise still stayed with Engineering. So, they ended up being a wrapper layer, punting problems from customers to engineering.

So, engineering, spent same amount of time as before. Sometimes more. But the company had more than twice the amount of employees. A boatload of them hired for "services". The wrapper layer !

Now, everyone who counted money loved those people. As services was like lost money found.
Growing at high teen. Customers coughed up more for their speed of deployment. Engineering kept on doing the work in the back ground.

The accounting showed all the money coming in under the PIE of Services. Then money started talking !

When a budget cut came, engineers got cut. Services continued to splurge ! Less engineers more wrapper deadwood ! But more money in wrapper pie.

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Betaal took a pause from story telling. For Vicky, it was not unknown ! It was more re-instating the fear he always had. The company evolved from the technical thought leader to a white elephant ! Nicely decorated and wonderfully presented. Standing on the back of dead engineers who worked and saved all thir life for the elephant to splurge and look good.