[alsobrsp]

Corporate implosions of the dot-com era are fantastic reads. I was a part of the Northwestern Corporation, Expanets, Lucent fiasco. It was crazy the decisions that were made. I spec'ed a million dollar Sun Hardware purchase, my boss turned it into a $25 million 5 year, rental at a Quest DC in Denver.

We also had an entire floor of an Arthur Andersen building in Jersey where we were writing our new app. There was another floor that was off limits to anyone not a partner. A friend of mine saw trucks of document boxes come in. The paper shredders were working overtime there, we assume anyway.

Expanets didn't need to go down that way, greed and stupidity are powerful drugs.

[ipython]

Yes, those are great stories... we were a small VC funded startup that had maybe five customers. We needed a network monitoring solution, so I built out a Big Brother network monitoring system (for nostalgia, check out the demo site: https://web.archive.org/web/20010124042600/http://bb4.com/bb...). I was told under no uncertain terms that Big Brother was not professional enough for our purposes and we needed to build out an entire NOC with HP OpenView. To monitor about 20 servers at the time, maybe growing to 100. At a cost of about $2m for the hardware, training, and facility buildout.

There was also the $1m/month rental of the EMC Symmetrix storage array (again, for five customers). When things went belly up and we needed to cut costs, we just moved data centers in the middle of the night, abandoning the Symmetrix storage array at the old facility (since the lease was covered in our colo payments).

Ahhhh those were the days... I did enjoy driving 26' rental trucks full of mission critical datacenter racks around the area as a 21yo. Fun fact: it's easier to rent a box truck as a 21yo than a regular car (at least it was at the time).