uunix wrote:
An employee of SGI wrote a 5 or 6 part blog on the demise of SGI and I'm sure it was the section 'CRAP SUPPLIERS'..
As an ex-supplier (not to SGI but to other companies) there is a second side to that story.
Chapter One : Purchasing agents are worthless scum-sucking lying loser pricks. They should all be drowned like unwanted kittens. They get a quote, then they beat you up harder. Then they cut the quantity. Then they increase the requirements. Then they threaten you. Then they want to reduce the price
again
.
Or there is the other method : "here, we have a few prototypes to make, can you do it for cheap ? When (if, actually) the production run comes in you can make it all back and more." Of course, what happens is that when (if) the part goes into production, after you have a few hundred unpaid hours in figuring out the best way to make the part, what needs to be changed or improved, a few dozen phone calls with the 'design team' to correct weaknesses, they take your quote and shop it around to get cheaper prices elsewhere. For five cents they will happily forget every promise they ever made. Hey, it's just business ! gotta make a prooofit ! (Even when that means being an unethical worthless asshole, but hey ! again, this is the USA ! Money is what counts, right ? Then they get righteous about welfare queens.)
On several occasions, late in life after I'd figured this out, as soon as those people would start in on the "this is just a few parts, understand, but when the production comes ..." I'd hand them a twenty and tell them to go away. It was a lot cheaper. (The look on their face was worth the twenty)
Or they take the long view and sucker you in, sweet-talk you into buying a lot of equipment and hiring people to do a large volume, then once you are committed they squeeze you and squeeze you and squeeze you until you are working for less than free. Ask anyone in Sillycone Valley - Applied Materials (biggest player of this particular game) is
SHIT
. If there were a mass execution of Applied Materials PA's, there would be a thousand cheering vendors buying tickets to watch.
(Yes, I did do work for Applied Materials and yes, it did take over 120 days and countless phone calls to get paid. Fuck them, forever and ever, amen.)
How can one make quality parts under those circumstances ? SGI was responsible for that state of affairs.
Chapter Two : worthless asshole MBA's running large companies, e.g. SGI. Pay your bills ? Oh no, we work on other peoples' money ! Aren't we smart ? Pay on time ? You gotta be kidding ! Do you know the cost of money ? If we pay 90 days late, that's free financing ! Plus, did you know ? The public is really dumb ! We can buy $15 cards from Adaptec and sell them for $500 ! Whoo, that's some good business there, boy ! Nobody will ever figure that out cuz we's so clever !
Nobody but the good suppliers (and eventually the public), who will no longer do business with your company. "Don't you want to make 500 power supplies for us ?" No, not when we lose five bucks on each one. Go get them in Taiwan, they don't know about you. Yet.
Again, my life got
soooo
much better when I went c.o.d. If they wouldn't give me the work under those circumstances, they didn't plan to pay for it anyway. I wasn't losing anything.
Try going into the grocery store and telling the checkout lady to send you a bill, you'll gladly pay it next Tuesday. Yeah right. Fuck two ten, net thirty. They always take the two but pay in one-twenty. After fifty-three phone calls. Maybe.
I almost forgot ... SGI's drooling loser worthless design team (great spiky haircuts tho. And cool tattos. And don't forget the impeccable taste in artisanal beers). Open your late-model SGI, you
will
find evidence of the most moronic execution on the planet. Just one example out of thousands : Altix 350 case and O350 case. Almost exactly the same
except
three holes .050" different. They couldn't possibly have kept the serial ports in the same place ? New stamping dies, twice as much to keep in inventory, twice as much paperwork (or more), ten times as much potential for fuckups, all for what ? A sixteenth inch difference in the serial port location ? Wanna talk stoopid ? Here's the problem with that "we'll do the intelligent work, them little brown people can do the nasty factory work" : when your so-called designers have the brains of a flea, that plan fails.
This is not the only example of gross imbecility on SGI's part. Think "Fuel power supply" for another. In fact, every time you turn around in late-version SGI products, you find some piece of total shit that never should have seen the light of day.
It wasn't the Inventor's Dilemna that doomed SGI. It was their own stupidity and greed. They wanted big money for products that were no longer worth a shit.
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