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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Followup British Telecom outage reason
> Possibly slow down a bit on rolling all those new features and widgets > into the software.... Make the software do what it should, reliably.. then > put the new stuff in there. Yeah but... these activities support existing customers with existing products, and they enable no revenue (the support fees are already in the bag). To dedicate that much engineering energy -- probably more than 50% of the corporate total if "doing it right" is the goal -- would put new customer revenue and new product revenue at risk. This icky tradeoff is why new (as in pre-IPO in some cases) vendors can still get a fair test in existing networks. Eng&Ops type people have told me more than once that they thought $NEW_ROUTER_VENDOR could be a good investment simply because nearly 100% of their engineering resources would be dedicated to making their small number of customers happy, and being a larger customer amongst a small set increased this advantage even more. The big challenge at an established router company is in management of the competing priorities more than in management of, or doing of, engineering. -- Paul Vixie <[email protected]> President, PAIX.Net Inc. (NASD:MFNX)
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