Few days back I came to know that Decho is no more . I always had a feeling that Decho ( piworx) is sitting on a time bomb and explosion getting rescheduled every time ,but this time it happened and I did hit the shock waves . Though after leaving pi in May 2008 I shouldn't be bothered about it but truth is that I always was and the reason was that I loved this idea and fear was its unfortunate destiny. In this blog I am not trying to reach a conclusion , its just a medium which I find effective to shout out, to release your frustration and anger digitally .
Idea of PI was much ahead of time, it was a pioneer in cloud computing. Be it be making your data independent of machines and devices or generating various user friendly views of same data. In fact it was a solution to bring all your devices online interacting with each other in almost real time.
In a nutshell it was supposed to be a revolutionary product but its sad to know that its Indian operations have been called off. I don't know how to react. This news didn't come to me as a surprise , its not like I was expecting this but I was never confident about the business sense of people driving it here in India.
If we do an analysis we will realize that it has all the things which are required to make a company successful
- It had a revolutionary idea.
- It had starter and mentor like Paul Maritz
- Outside of India it had highly experienced team of technical people
- In India it was able to get and retain best minds of the industry
- Being the Pioneer there was no competition there was a big market to capture
- No funds crunch for at least past 6 years.
- A big associated brand name (PI was acquired by EMC)
- Later stage it had a user base of Mozy (Pi acquired Mozy and renamed to Decho)
Why did it fail?
At the core of every business is the money and there is nothing wrong in it if business grows with you but in case of PI things were bit different. Everybody was concerned about her or his (plz mind his following her) growth and importance.
- PI got acquired by EMC in year 2008 , higher management got its share , few people were happy that their signature now has bit more value
- Paul Martiz the Captain who used to show his commitments and affection for PI left the ship to sink , he became the CEO of EMC cloud division and later CEO of VMWARE - His purpose to start a company got solved he made his part of money
- Top management dragged it to its grave- In India some incompetent people with over confidence were driving the company , its a clear example that just number of years spent in industry don't make good managers or leaders. It wouldn't be wrong to say that top management was like a nexus of people appreciating and concealing the mistakes of each other . This group was based on policy " you appreciate me , I appreciate you" . There were talks to shift to EMC campus to reduce the cost of operation but because of self interest ( as their house was near to current Aditi Office ) they never decided to shift, it shows how serious they were for their interest rather than future of company and product
- No sense of business - investment is 6 years , 6 long years , 6 very expensive years. and whats the output ? When resigned I asked this question and the answer was we have some piece of code (great technology) and I added without any business value.
- To me it appeared to be student's learning program not a product development organization , here you can learn new technologies and try new things. All the effort and capital went into the self learning of individuals. It had a policy that we will develop what we want or can irrespective of what a user wants or market demands. Mother product piworx was withdrawn
- In 6 years they were not able to freeze there UI, every 3 months it used to change and till last moment it was not impressive enough.
To me closure of Indian operations and end of Decho didn't come as a surprise , its not like I was expecting it to happen but I was never ever sure of its future because of its higher management lack of vision and (though some people completed executive MBA) no sense of business. What I felt was that even they were not sure of its future, they were making good money , they were heading towards a good future , internally they were getting mutual respect and virtual sense of authority for being head of some "ABC" and "xyz" department .
It was like a ship without a captain surviving because of its core working class people . Engineering people delivered whatever they were asked . But people who had responsibility to drive these engineering people were self declared heroes - nobody can question their so called innovation and thoughts.
At this point of time I don't hesitate to say that it failed to deliver because of its leaders.Firing few wrong people would have been better than vanishing the whole company because of them and support of management to these decision making people.
There is so many thoughts and analysis going on in my mind ..may be some of you don't agree with my thoughts and I respect that.
