[ferminaut]

IBM Watson is the result of IBM being led by sales people instead of engineers. Prior to the role of CEO, Ginni Rometty was head of global sales, marketing, and strategy @ IBM. I dont think that was a coincidence that over Ginni's reign IBM tried to sell multiple 'dumb' products like Hyperledger, and completely missed the mark on cloud. IBM was in the business of overselling something and letting the engineers figure out how to make it work.

[fsckboy]

c'mon, do you know how many "led by engineers" hardware companies have failed to make a splash in the market? hell, the NeXT was an engineering play that utterly failed, and they weren't even led by an engineer, many people think that guy was a marketing genius.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> c'mon, do you know how many "led by engineers" hardware companies have failed to make a splash in the market?

Statistically, I'd guess that most companies fail, but I don't think engineering-first companies do any worse than marketing-first companies. Granted, it's a balancing act; you have to be able to sell, but you have to have something to sell; omitting either will end badly.

> hell, the NeXT was an engineering play that utterly failed, and they weren't even led by an engineer, many people think that guy was a marketing genius.

NeXT was led by Steve Jobs, who was, as you note, not an engineer. I'm not sure what you mean this to be an example of, but it's not really relevant to arguments about "led by engineers" companies.

[fijiaarone]

Engineer led companies fail because they don’t receive enough funding. Sales & Marketing led companies fail because they spend too much money.

[abudabi123]

I read somewhere in passing the IBM Watson project spent significant money buying medical imagery datasets to get to the starting line.

[dreamcompiler]

"Utterly failed" is a big overstatement. NeXT created the technology that became MacOS and IOS, and they built the machine TBL used to invent the web.

NeXT didn't make a lot of money but their impact was huge.

[ZiiS]

I would also like $400 million for "Utterly Failing".

[rhaway84773]

The ultimate irony about Steve Jobs’s companies led by sales vs engineering was that Jobs was little more than a salesman himself. He certainly wasn’t an engineer.

Or, rather, it wasn’t ironic and he was talking about a company culture driven by sales rather than product broadly, and wasn’t talking about individual CEOs at all, which is how many misunderstand his statement as.

And a sales driven company culture can be created both by sales driven CEOs and engineering driven CEOs and vice versa.

[scarface74]

No SJ wasn’t a sales person he was a product person. There is a huge difference. Especially in his later years, he knew good products and he had good taste.

Eric Schmidt for instance wouldn’t even use an Android device four years after it was introduced. Jobs made them retool the iPhone after it was introduced and before it was launched because he didn’t like how much the screen scratched in his pocket.

[HWR_14]

Wasn't Jobs a salesman who spent some time as an engineer? That is, a phenomenal salesman somewhat rooted in what was actually possible?

And paired with a phenomenal engineer cofounder.

[gpderetta]

didn't NeXT reverse-acquire Apple? And the rest is history?

[wellanyway]

>NeXT

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