Thread regarding SAS Institute layoffs

More highways and state parks, Bob?

I maintain that had SAS kept its original, R&D-driven cultural strong and not allowed so many internal politics and the promotion/hiring of less-than-competent management, then there was at least some probability that the cloud and open source waves could’ve been caught and ridden soon enough to keep the company and its technology thriving.

This, of course, is the dilemma that any company who that was successful in one paradigm,/generation must face. Take a hard look at Google. It was primarily the extremely innovative, highly scalable technical infrastructure pioneered by a few early engineering luminaries that set them on the course of web search and email dominance for so long. Of more recent years they’ve had a string of highly unsuccessful products and a very bloated, marketing/business driven internal culture.

Although several orders of magnitude smaller than what Google ultimately grew to — by year 2000 SAS had the cash and continuous revenue stream to fund ongoing heavy R&D. The problem is the business and product management people at the time did not really understand the R&D brain trust and quickly grew to see Devs as little resource cogs that they owned.

I once heard a (recently installed) Product Manager say something to the effect of “my product, my developers” with a tone signifying that he “owned” the technology and the people who built it. Does anyone think that sat well with those of us who already had 10+ years in R&D, in many cases having built great relationships directly with customers, were still head down—doing our jobs, learning on our own (because SAS was rarely willing to fund external education), and keeping up with tech trends?

SAS became so highly successful in the first 25 years of its existence by being different than most other tech companies. Then we slowly became more like the old IBM, attempting to make incremental short term revenue gains rather than lean heavily on our own internal brain trust to identify and capture the next big wave.

The parallels to Moses and the glory days of NYC infrastructure are spot on. Well played, anonymous internet stranger. I see you're not a manager or a director. ;)

The market had been telling SAS something, but it seems that SAS didn't want to listen or hear those messages as they may not have been congruent with internal belief structures or strategies that were successful in the past.

For example, building new highway systems worked well for Robert Moses in the early years. As time wore on, those systems became congested. The citizens of New York needed more mass transit options. Those options were presented to Moses, and Moses chose to build more highways. Those who presented alternative options were destroyed. Sycophants who supported more highways were promoted. The citizens of New York remained stuck in traffic.

Interpret that however you see fit.

There was indeed a great deal of investment in R&D, but only in certain projects. Others were starved of resources.

There was also a great deal of listening to the market. But the market can only say how existing products should be enhanced; it can’t tell you how the market itself should be disrupted. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

The market has been disrupted by open source. For this reason, many people have suggested that SAS change its underlying architecture to embrace open source. But that cannibalizes the existing revenue stream. It can’t be done unless new revenue streams are created. 



Changes to sales processes would help. But fundamentally, new products are required to start new revenue streams.

There was a great deal of investment in R&D. It conferred some sort of tax advantage to the Corporation. Developer pride, arrogance, and nostalgia, however, are not viable market strategies moving forward.

Listening to the market, and changing pieces of the underlying architecture and sales processes might be, however. But let's face it - that's not going to happen under the current regime.

In reply to the OP. Strong R&D is the foundational DNA of SAS. Throughout the 80s and well into the 90s it was innovation that grew the company to its first and (much of) second $Billion in annual revenue. There was a strong culture of collaboration and partnership, with other tech vendors, especially HW companies. The top brain trust within R&D was still doing considerable “basic research“, not in a pure university sense, but by internally growing the intellectual capital and software designs needed to fend off disruption from the outside. Sadly, it was also a few internal political operatives who put a damper on much of this.

By the year 2000 things started to change at a product management driven model and highly paid “sales g-ns” (ref the Action Jack Silicon Valley episodes). The traditional SAS culture was very foreign to this kind of thinking. By then the company had grown to thousands of employees — many 15+ years in and built from the aforementioned R&D driven DNA. Slowly their passion fire began to be put out. Some left the company altogether while others went to work for internal “start ups“ like Southpeak Interactive, Midway Air, etc. it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Google came calling to check out what made our culture so unique. They went on to disrupt through a very similar innovation and workplace model to what SAS had pioneered 20 years prior. It’s as if we got beat at our own game, although this did not become fully apparent until a decade later (2010) when we were riding high at the top of the analytics market. The big cloud vendors clearly took notice of this, and with salaries, funded by massive market capitalization they were able to hire the best and brightest PhD’s/post docs, etc. — truth is they had already been doing so for the 5 to 7 years prior.

In a very real sense. SAS had already conceded the platform by that point. The company road tall for a couple of years as we were voted Fortune Magazine’s, #1 best company to work for back to back. However, that was the beginning of a slow retreat because in reality, we were already a decade behind. Many of us saw it that with 20+ years in at that point, resolved to continue working with the platform technologies, we knew while having very strict parameters defined by management in terms of what and how we could innovate. A micromanaged culture is one of the principal things that hamstrung SAS R&D.

Yes, they did "create Visual Analytics to solve all those Tableau, QlikTech, and Power BI competition problems."

And that's a great example of an analytics UI that was well-funded. So why didn't it solve those problems?

But they created Visual Analytics to solve all those Tableau, QlickTech, and Power BI competition problems.

Most problems with SAS analytics UIs were not due to graphic design. As the OP suggests, some projects were under-funded. Others were well-funded, but built features that the market did not want. Both cases generated only small revenue streams.

Tableau's revenues were around $1B last year. Qlik brought in about half that. Other products in that market make money. If SAS had just part of those revenue streams, the situation would be so much better now.

Didn't they hire loads of Graphic Designers to fix all those problems?

The analytics UI is the biggest opportunity SAS missed. That market was ours; we knew it; we were already in it. If that revenue stream had only been created, even at half the size of Tableau’s, the money would still be rolling in.

The market rewarded good analytics UIs. Tableau, QlikTech, PowerBI, and others made money — even in competition with open source.

We “tried, and tried again”. Joe built a UI, but it didn’t sell, so Mary built one. Mary’s didn’t sell, so we let Tom or Sally try. This went on for decades.

The direction was correct. The execution consistently failed.

A sad, frustrating and validating comment. Many of us wish it wasn't so.