This site is often filled with responses from the jilted and jaded. Does anyone still believe the company has a viable path forward? Are the right people still in place to execute that turnaround, or is it time for employees to start planning their exit?
There is a lot of complacency abounds with people openly stating they are just hanging around for the paycheck. Does anyone have faith? I'm by no means the "Company Man", but I would like to still believe that there is a path forward.
@1gt I'm going to copy and paste the output I was given since someone can't seem to figure out how to ask the question himself......but it's going to be painful to read because it will lose all formatting and I'm not going to waste time cleaning it up for someone conversing in bad faith
What are examples of companies at least 50 years old with low name recognition
If you mean companies that have been around for at least 50 years, are substantial businesses, but whose names aren't widely recognized by the general public, there are many examples. These are often business-to-business (B2B) manufacturers, industrial suppliers, or firms that sell components rather than consumer products.
Here are some good examples:
Company Founded What it does
Parker Hannifin 1917 Hydraulic, pneumatic, and motion-control systems
W.W. Grainger 1927 Industrial and maintenance supplies
Illinois Tool Works 1912 Makes thousands of specialized industrial products
Timken 1899 Bearings and industrial equipment
Emerson Electric 1890 Automation and commercial technologies
A. O. Smith 1874 Water heaters and water treatment
Carlisle Companies 1917 Roofing and engineered materials
Roper Technologies 1890 Vertical software and industrial technologies
IDEX Corporation 1988 Pumps, valves, and specialty engineered products
Graco 1926 Paint sprayers and industrial pumps
Some lesser-known but very large firms include:
Fastenal (founded 1967)
MSC Industrial Direct (1941)
Lincoln Electric (1895)
Regal Rexnord (through predecessor companies dating to 1955 and earlier)
Pentair (1966)
If you mean "low name recognition despite being huge"
These companies often have:
Revenues of $10–20+ billion.
Tens of thousands of employees.
Products used every day without consumers noticing the company behind them.
For example:
Illinois Tool Works makes products used in auto manufacturing, food equipment, welding, and construction.
Parker Hannifin components are found in aircraft, factory equipment, and heavy machinery.
W.W. Grainger is one of North America's largest industrial distributors, yet many consumers have never heard of it.
Extremely old, very large, but obscure
Some of the best examples are:
McMaster-Carr (1901)
SKF (1907)
Eaton (1911)
Dover Corporation (1955)
Nordson Corporation (1954)
These firms are all decades old, financially significant, and highly respected within their industries, but they have relatively low recognition among the general public because they primarily serve businesses rather than consumers.
@1ec It's seems such a simple thing to bring up Chat-GPT in a separate browser window and ask the same question yourself.
Certainly quicker than me trying to copy and paste formatted tabular output into a non-tabular non-formatted d-mb text field. I'm not your secretary.
@1ec If you can’t instinctively see this as true or do simple google or ai search yourself then you slow and lazy.
CHat-GPT just gave me 15 examples
What were they, the names of these companies? It seems such a simple thing to copy-and-paste them from one tab to another in your browser, but you didn't do that. Weird.
"Name one company that has been around for 50 years that has so little name recognition. Keep living in your bubble that SAS is relevant."
CHat-GPT just gave me 15 examples of low name recognition companies with revenues of $10-20b or more and 'tens of thousands of employees'
I've only heard of two of them but.....that's kind of the point!
@wc "Your jobs will probably continue"
True, for a while. ~20% headcount reduction over 8 years is ~2.5% per year. This axe falls every year, but it can be dodged.
However, any new owner will want to maximize profit. A slow trickle doesn't give them what they want, so they'll do a mass layoff.
May this singularity be long delayed.
There’s some real cr-p systems out there that endure in the wild. If base SAS is integrated with them, it’s easier to pay the annual bill than to switch. Your jobs will probably continue, especially for the pets in the Art Department, which is safe.
@qf Name one company that has been around for 50 years that has so little name recognition. Keep living in your bubble that SAS is relevant.
@qf 20% I should have said, not 25%. Perhaps someone else can provide a more precise figure.
The fact remains: SAS is shrinking. Some people on this site claim SAS is "stable". But a company that shrinks by 2-3% annually is not stable; it is shrinking. It is not a place to have a career, unless you only need one for a few years.
@nq 'Perhaps you meant to write "you continue to get paid for doing your job, while you use your free time to learn, in preparation for your next job"?'
That is better than what I wrote, and close to what I meant.
The idea I tried to convey is that, unless you're near retirement, the purpose of SAS can't be to have a career and earn a living.
SAS has cut headcount by 2-3% annually for about eight years now -- usually through a mix of layoffs, buyouts, and attrition. But last week they cut 2.5% through layoffs alone.
The company is ~25% smaller than it used to be. SAS is going to keep cutting, and anyone who acquires it will cut a lot more.
By all means, give an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. But this employer must be used as a vehicle to acquire marketable skills. People who don't do that are going to get hurt.
@pk I could name countless companies who you could ask about outside their hometown or ask 40 and unders about and get blank stares.
Do you think that is somehow meaningful?
I see the SAS lifers have found this thread and are downvoting all the honest and truthful comments about SAS’ future. A little homework for you all, leave Cary and ask someone about SAS, or even better someone under 40. You will then understand via their blank looks that SAS is in serious trouble.
We will be late to market -- again. Not jaded, just honest.
To the OP.. nope, we won't have a fighting chance.
Perhaps you meant to write "you continue to get paid for doing your job, while you use your free time to learn, in preparation for your next job"?
Whether or not that's what they meant, that's the fact Jack. One of the biggest mistakes SAS has made since Viya moved off v9 is trying to hire expertise. SAS can't pay competitive salaries for those people (and they aren't in the budget in any case), and isn't growing its bench. Rather than teach someone who knows high-performance computing to "do in cloud", SAS division heads expected to hire someone who knows how to do in cloud but doesn't understand high-performance computing, have any history with the company, or even know how to use its software.
"SAS pays people while they learn marketable skills — on your own time and your own dime, probably — but still, you get paid to learn."
Perhaps you meant to write "you continue to get paid for doing your job, while you use your free time to learn, in preparation for your next job"?
@kj No one cares whether you are grateful.
You compete against third-world countries, grateful or not.
Oh ok. So we should be grateful to not be in a third world country. Eyeroll. Unbelievable.
Getting back to @OP’s question:
Historically, the core competence of SAS was high-performance analytics. That was our market niche.
Now, our market niche is occupied by freeware: R, Python, Spark, etc. Therefore, we need a new market niche.
What is it? If a viable path forward exists, every employee should be able to describe it.
If you can’t describe it, there probably isn’t one.
In that case, every employee should consider SAS a benefactor funding their education.
SAS pays people while they learn marketable skills — on your own time and your own dime, probably — but still, you get paid to learn.
That’s it. That is the deal. It used to be a better deal — but millions of people in third-world countries would love to be in this position.
Those near retirement can wait and hope for a package. Everyone else should be planning their next move.
No executive worth a dollar would ever come to or stay at SAS. When you hear such wisdom from the CEO like “cloud is just a fad” and “open source will never be our competition” you run. Exactly why he has the c-suite team he has, they will just nod their heads and collect the paycheck. Anyone that disagrees with this must have come from Nortel.
A C-team full of yes people - and VPs who are yes people and directors who are yes people - stifles innovation and efficiency. That's true 100x over when said people remain in their roles for decades without being held accountable not only for performance, but for not fixing things that have clearly gone wrong.
Many of us pay for the fact that hard decisions were not made so many times over the previous 10 or so years.
The chickens are coming home to roost as they always do.
@jn I worked at SAS for 18 years and many of them on the 6th floor of C. Any executive that tried to do anything meaningful beyond Goodnight’s rigid view was let go, or more wisely quit. SAS is a dictatorship, and like all dictatorships… they are doomed to fail.
@jm “I see this accusation of Dr. Goodnight thrown around here a lot. But is it really true?”
Not true. But all the anonymous people whom have never been in a room with the man will tell you otherwise.
"none of them will ever have an opinion that differs from him."
I see this accusation of Dr. Goodnight thrown around here a lot. But is it really true?
"no real company would hire any of those hacks."
Now this I readily agree with.
SAS is 100% doomed. I mean look no further than the c-suite under Goodnight, no real company would hire any of those hacks. But he has them because of one reason…. none of them will ever have an opinion that differs from him.
One thing that is rarely mentioned in these discussions is SAS market share.
Stable revenue in a stable industry is one thing, stable revenue in a rapidly growing industry is another, and that has been the case for SAS these past 10 years.
How much has the market grown in the past 10 years? 3x, 5x, 10x? Our market share has dinimished accordingly, which makes doing business much harder, because our voice is (relatively) much smaller. There's a risk we're becoming irrelevant, because of diminishing market and mind share. Potential buyers will recognize that risk, and value us accordingly.
I don’t recall a single person saying that someone was going to buy SAS “and keep it intact to please the founder”.
That last part is ridiculous enough that it doesn’t really need saying. But you do you.
But someone WILL buy SAS. And if you think a profitable 3+b company doesn’t have value other than “the code” then you are truly clueless in how businesses are valued.
The company is only worth what anyone is willing to pay for it. There was a window of several years where things were on the upswing and that window has closed. The only thing that has value now is the code. No company is going to buy SAS and keep it all intact to please the founder and all that. It's just not going to happen.
For a brief shining moment, it was Camelot. Now its best days are behind it and that's how it goes. Critical things were either not kept up with or were kept as is for the wrong reasons and profitability has suffered for it.
@ev Then explain to us exactly how a companies value is determined. I know the answer and I promise you that revenue and profitability are major parts of the equation.
Growth vs Stable vs Contraction are also factors but not the only ones. And stable is not the 2 headed monster you seem to think it is.
@et I didn’t say its revenues declined. Its value surely has.
But you’re right, that guy may miss the distinction 😁.
Queue the "decline to 3+ billion" guy!
Recent articles aside, the talks with Broadcom advertised to the world that the company is for sale. Clearly, no one has offered the desired price.
“too many highly paid people allowed to stay in their roles so no fresh ideas were ever allowed in.”
There lies the root of the oroblem. When a tech company stifles innovation, its value can only decline.
oh yes because there are so many articles about sas these days. right.
@cm stop being obtuse. There have been several articles written about SAS lately. Forbes has been widely shared. Fortune had not (because it doesn't exist). It was a genuine question in seeking knowledge of an article that was mentioned on the thread.
@cm Be nice. Allow for the possibility that N (the number of articles that have been written about SAS) is greater than 1. Therefore, inquiring which of N>1 articles the writer had in mind is a perfectly reasonable question.
Jeez I wonder why the company is in trouble. It was Forbes, not Fortune, and if you're so d-mb you can't even google to find it, you're part of the problem.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2026/05/15/billionaire-sas-jim-goodnight-built-an-analytics-profit-machine-ai-forcing-reinvention/
Kodak, is that you calling? Blockbuster...ToysRUs....Nokia...SAS
Share link to Fortune article please
@av Please - which "the Fortune article"?
No. The Fortune article made it very clear that they're shopping the company to be sold. If you didn't read it, then you need to.
What we will see until it's on its last legs is a constant reduction in force. At some point the payout policy will probably change to offer less money.
SAS is done. I'm sorry to tell you that but it is. Too many years without change, too much complacency, too many highly paid people allowed to stay in their roles so no fresh ideas were ever allowed in. It's sad.