OK Folks -- what will it take!
7 replies (most recent on top)
SAS used to have an actual “Office of Worldwide Strategy”.
We never could figure out what that guy did. My Director, exasperated, finally confronted him: “R——, strategy has to consist of something more than just doing what the owner says!”
And my Director learned that, no, actually — no, it does not :-)
SAS has an actual, announced, aligned strategy: to reduce headcount and IPO.
That’s the only strategy. It has been executed for several years, and will be for several more.
This is terribly sad to watch, for us retirees. It's worse for our friends who remain.
If you're still in the game, make sure you understand the rules. Good luck to all.
An actual strategy. Right now it appears that there are myriad strategies across the organization with very little alignment between the different factions. Execs need to get together and put their egos and fiefdoms aside to hammer out a strategy that is aligned across all business units.
As others have said: a time machine. SAS is a dying company and brand. In the end (and sooner than the company's executives expect or want), SAS's IP will be sold to the highest bidder and will live briefly as a "powered by SAS" business intelligence application. Then, over the next several years, the "powered by SAS" badge will get smaller and smaller until the new owner removes it entirely, noting the change only in a press release that no one will pay to place in PR Newswire.
No, the final, and ultimate, death of SAS will be recorded by a footnote: a press release straight to the IP owner's "Investor Relations" page.
Thus ends SAS.
They need a time machine to go back to when all the stars were aligned for SAS.
No competition, loads of academic enthusiasts, different customer expectations, etc.
The world has changed, and the stars will never align like that for SAS again. Never.
Another sad fact is that SAS still has plenty of talent. There are enough good engineers to build products, enough good sales folks to sell them, excellent tech support and others to help.
However, current management have demonstrated over many years that they do not have the skills to produce software that the market wants.
Therefore, what's needed is wholesale management change.
The time machine seems more likely.
It will take producing software that the market wants. Versus producing software that users got stuck with.
SAS took years to become great through hard work and focusing their vision primarily on the customer wants(versus ESG and DEI wants as well as internal wants). Old age tends to attack vision of the eye and perhaps even the person. Sadly, SAS went from great to good in a matter of mere months. Gravity. That means objects fall faster than they rise. And that is where SAS is.
The sad thing is that recent SAS hires never had a taste of that greatness. The next time MBA biz schools reference SAS in their case studies, the story won't be nearly as glowing as it was the first time.
A time machine.