11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
White Pride, November 24, 2005
This review is from: The Real Story of Informix Software and Phil White: Lessons in Business and Leadership for the Executive Team (Hardcover)
This is an interesting, if sterile, dissection of the rise and fall of one-time Silicon Valley darling Informix and their charismatic CEO, Phil White. Author Steve Martin was an Informix employee in the critical years from 1991 through 1997, and therefore speaks with the authority and insider's knowledge not found in the perspective of an outside journalist, burdened by the baggage of an interviewee's selective recall. Martin couples with the history a series of business lessons, which, while not profound, provide a succinct primer of management basics that are broadly applicable. Not the least of these lessons is the danger in allowing personal rivalries to cloud sound business judgment. In the case of Informix, an irrational focus on beating Oracle and it's obnoxious CEO, Larry Ellison, could be traced to Informix's eventual demise. While Martin is admittedly a Phil White sympathizer, he is not an apologist, and does a good job of presenting the other side of the story that was so negatively twisted by a scandal-crazed press and a US Justice Department which, in the days of Enron and WorldCom, was chomping at the bit to get a major CEO in handcuffs doing the perp walk wearing stripes. Even the most cynical critic of Informix and White must concede that the offense that ultimately sunk the Informix ship was disproportional to the consequences delivered by Judge Breyer.
This book will be most appreciated by those who have lived and worked in Silicon Valley during the days immediately preceding the Internet boom and subsequent bust, as well as those not intimidated by a fairly heavy dosage of product-related technical jargon. Having been a Silicon Valley CEO at the time with some familiarity with White and the team, I was hoping for more specifics in the disastrous Illustra acquisition - especially more of the personalities involved - but that in no way impacts a solid story that deserves to be chronicled. In summary, if you're looking for an orgy of Informix gossip and dirty laundry, this isn't it. But for a quick and insightful history of an important chapter in Silicon Valley, "The Real Story of Informix Software..." is worth the time.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Venture Chronicles Review by Jeff Nolan, November 6, 2005
This review is from: The Real Story of Informix Software and Phil White: Lessons in Business and Leadership for the Executive Team (Hardcover)
One of the nice benefits to having a blogging gig is how many books I get sent to me by publishers and PR firms representing publishers and authors. I actually read about 1/2 of them but rarely do I write a review, probably because I feel a little bit of conflict in the sense of obligation to write something positive about something someone gives me. I don't know, maybe I just subconsciously feel that I won't get any more free books if I go negative on them.
One book that I have no problem writing something good about is The Real Story of Informix Software and Phil White, by Steve Martin. I really enjoyed reading this book and as someone who "came of age" in that crazy time of the early to mid 1990's I felt that this account tied up a lot of loose ends for me.
The book starts out by covering the event that almost killed Informix, the acquisition of Innovative Software. You may recall that this company had a killer spreadsheet program called Wingz and Informix believed that there future was in desktop productivity. This misfortunate acquisition heralded the arrival of Phil White who was brought in to clean things up.
If you know Phil you know that this guy is the prototypical competitor with uncanny leadership abilities. People like Phil and want to be around him, and he knows how to run an enterprise software company, and the book does go into a lot of detail about how Phil positioned Informix and measured performance.
Some of these lessons still ring true today, such as:
"We learned a valuable lesson from all this losing: whether inadvertently or on purpose, the customer always lied. One of an Informix salesperson's primary responsibilities was to determine whether a customer was lying and whether we had an honest opprotunity to win the deal.
We learned another important lesson. If we were not in the deal from the very beginning, we would most likely lose because we didn't have a relationship with the customer. Therefore, even though we were battling Oracle and Sybase on a daily basis, our real enemy was time. We wasted it working on dealswere we didn't belong in the first place."
Also recounted in this book are some of the decisions that brought to an end the database wars of the 90's, such as Sybase's acquisition of Powersoft.
"Predictably, onc ethe merger was announced, the other database vendors immediately stopped working with Powersoft."
Lot's of discussion about row level locking, and if you lived through it you will recall what a huge deal this was, ultimately bringing down Sybase because they didn't have it. The lesson here is that sometimes it's not a matter of having it or not having it, but when you have it that counts.
Of course, Informix went on to some monsterous misses that ended up costing Phil his job, and in the subsequent revelations and earnings restatements that went on to legal proceedings culminating in some jail time for Phil. I can't excuse breaking the law, but such outcomes also don't diminish the fact that Phil rescued a company that was on the bring of obscurity and even today I look at his leadership skills with admiration.
The book does a good job of covering the downfall and lessons learned from Phil's fall from grace, as well as anyone could have. I ended up taking a lot away from this book, a lot more than simply "Phil built up the company, broke the law, went to jail".
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More history than lessons in business, November 4, 2005
This review is from: The Real Story of Informix Software and Phil White: Lessons in Business and Leadership for the Executive Team (Hardcover)
Being a lifelong fan of Informix (past and future), it was a pleasure for me to read this book. By volume, I viewed the book as 80% or more the story of Informix, versus a treatment on business strategy: there are bulleted lists of business lessons to be observed that could have been attached to the history of nearly any software company that lived through the 1980s and 1990s. To apply these lessons to any current situation or company you may be leading, takes extra effort on behalf of the reader.
As far as Informix and its failure, this book does make the case that it was not so much the famed accounting issues, as it was a failed business and sales strategy. Few if any are aware of the true reasons why Informix slipped. The author does an accurate and important deed in setting the record straight.
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