SRFERGU%ERENJ@PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU (Scott Ferguson) (06/19/91)
You know, a lot of corporate giants (Ford Motor Co., Xerox, Exxon, etc) are getting all hyped up in this "Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award" kind of stuff, and I get subjected to what amounts to "Common Sense Lessons" many times a year, because American corporations can't seem to please their customers, and people are buying foreign-made cars, computers, photocopiers, and if Japan made gasoline I'm sure America's supply would come from there. I used to think all that Quality hype was so silly. "Why wouldn't anyone naturally think that way?", I would ask myself. But then, we see the problem every morning when we read our Apollo Newsgroup. What should be the basic focus of any and all manufacturing companies (as well as other types of business) is to meet the needs of a group of CUSTOMERS, in exchange for money. (Sudden switch to global philosophizing...) Because finance, economics, and other liberal arts subjects are easier to handle in college than engineering and science, AND because investment bankers and stock traders make twice as much as we young engineers do, the world is full of financiers with little or no knowledge of the products they sell, or the customers they sell to. All they know about is the annual dividend, the current share price, etc. In the "good ole days", a vacuum salesman would demonstrate his product for you. Nowadays, a computer sales person hands you some glossies (or shows you a viewgraph if you're in one of their precious "Non-disclosure sessions" aimed at making you feel so special) with N MIPS, and if you've got a technical question, they have to go home and ask one of their engineer-salespeople. And for every sales person there's a "financial reporting" person, a dozen stock traders, and half of a systems engineer. (Back to the micro-scale and slightly less wispy...) Now I find myself ready to encourage the Quality initiative to anyone, because Common Sense has truly disappeared in favor of a Board of Directors and a group of Shareholders, and a marketing department that has learned that you can increase profits by forcing customers to buy a totally new system every year, and you can coerce them by taking a single UNIX operating system and making umpteen incompatible versions of it. No two standards are ever the same, and I don't really see it as an accident. The goals of marketing departments has become to maximize immediate short-term profits to attract a higher stock price. There is no more focus on creating a happy, supportive relationship with a customer. Well, like the amount of trees in Brazil, the number of customers in the world will some day level off. Dear Hewlett-Packard, Please get your face out of your Ticker Tape and look where you're going. Scott Ferguson These views are mine, and not the views of Exxon Research & Engineering Co. Nor, obviously, are they the views of Hewlett-Packard company. You know, I'm still at 9.7.5, and I haven't bought a new Apollo system in three years. Maybe I should just shut my trap and sign off of this list, because unless HP does something miraculous, I won't be buying any of their systems anymore. The technical help and sense of comraderie among the subscribers to this list is invaluable, but the OS/HP-Support discussions are giving me high blood pressure at an early age.