Rantings of a mad man.....

This guy is well beyond psychotic. Purposely shipping product with the 'oh well maybe the next release it will work' attitude?

He has no ethics or integrity, and does not care about anyone but himself. While he does seem able to deliver made up marketing speak, and seems quite capable of leaching off others hard work, he has done nothing positive in his career that I can tell. At least I now have clear direction after months of agonizing over this.




Link to a psychotics rants

For years we have implemented the concepts of sense and respond, in the context of a learning organization. For new web services, we reduced the time of market trials from months to weeks. We dramatically lowered the actual costs of experiments to the point of immateriality. And we improved forecasting accuracy.

In short, we were better, cheaper, and faster.

But we were still too slow. By stringing together waves of testing, it might take many months to extract major learnings. And being slow is very, very expensive.

We've recently begun to solve this problem through massive parallelization of sense and respond techniques. Rather than waiting for the results of a wave of testing, we continually launch new, overlapping waves. While we are unable to incorporate learning from one wave into the next sequentially, we have multiplied the speed of individual insights. We then reconcile and apply the learnings "on-the-fly" and/or "after-the-fact".

Our new process is less scientific, a little more costly, and a bit chaotic. But it is faster, creates far more value, and leads to higher quality. We are better meeting the challenges of the acceleratron.

 

I responded to his blog via my own blog, in a comment to a blog entry I made today regarding one of my sites and vBulletin 4.

Here's a quote:

 

Perhaps your type of approach is best. I'll continue to evaluate other solutions that vb4.

The leader of an organization sets the direction of the company, it matters not what the other people in the company try to do.



Maybe a more direct approach would be a comment here if anyone cares
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/entry.php?2379-Our-Vision-for-vBulletin

 

Unfortunately, it's gone way past that.

I've posted my concerns regarding the way vBulletin is handling their releases in the Licensed Feedback forum, like I'm supposed too, and have not yet received a reply regarding why they are doing it the way they are, nor stating that they will or will not continue this trend.

And despite the efforts of many many others, some incredibly nice about it, others more harsh, nothing has changed since IB changed the rules.

I'm through with hoping that management will turn around and balance development speed with development efficiency.

However, I do hope, that they will make me look like an ass, and prove me wrong.

 

I agree Ryan.

One thing though, I believe the speed of development vs quality is my concern. Efficiency, to me, is a meaningless way to measure things. Either something will work, or it will not.

v4.1 may work, v4.2 may not, there is absolutely no assurance that newer versions will work. At all.

 

In my example, Software Quality is included as an example of development efficiency.

 

I think we just got a big hint as to what's wrong with IB and vBulletin.

Can you imagine if this guy sold something else, say like cars?

Yeah, we built the car in a few weeks and then sent it out the door essentially untested. If it's not safe and crashes, then after the fact we just send it to the body shop and have it repaired and fix the issue that caused the crash. By doing so, we have almost completely eliminated the costs of R&D to nothing.... blah, blah, blah...whatever.

That crap is nothing more than a bunch of self-serving, ivy league, pysco-babble, that sounds really complicated and impressive and says nothing and means nothing.

Wow Bob, I know I'm really impressed.

Bobby's "passion wins" blog was another winner. Meanwhile, his leadership single-handedly wiped the passion right out of vBulletin as a business unit, along with most of the key employees.

Maybe in his next blog, he could explain why vBulletin 4 sucks the bag even though he's a genious...

 

I agree, especially this part

But I believe he is more of a little league player, not Ivy league. Seriously.



For the record, on the main IB site, this is still proudly listed as one of the IB brands sites.
Biker Forums - Motorcycle Enthusiast Forum - Powered by vBulletin

He does not care about anything, nothing at all. I am quite sure he fully expects to move to a new position doing something at some other company *long* before any of this catches up to him, which will happen in the next 12 - 18 months.

 

That crap was mostly directed at shareholders.

Translation, we reduced costs and increased revenues all at the same time.

The problem with his approach, is that it's basically all smoke and mirrors and not sustainable. Sure, he made more money in the short term of Q4 - 2009 with the pre-sale deal, but in the process, he's severely damaged vBulletin as a brand going forward and it will probably never recover.

For a guy that is the CEO of a company, that is largely focused on buying and managing communities and developing community software, he has essentially shown his complete ineptitude and lack of understanding of communities themselves.

At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding as the saying goes.

So I'm sure vBulletin will bring in good revenue for IB in Q4 of 2009, as many people panicked and bought the pre-sale. But now the truth is out and Q1 2010 is going to be horrible as far as vBulletin is concerned. Bob's next card to play is declaring 3 series EOL and hoping that people are forced to buy vB4.

If he's wrong and people don't buy vB4 and instead choose to do something else like move to other software in mass, then Bob is going to be left with a lot of egg all over his face and all over his, "how to be a new-age business guru" digests and books.

 

I commented on his blog, now to see if he approves it.

 

Personally, I think this entry is even more hilarious:

Bob Brisco's Blog: Six Keys to a Great Internet Business

And what happened to vBulletin focusing on the forum rather than competing with Facebook? Nothing bad with that, but this is hilarious in hindsight.

The much better doesn't seem to be vBulletin Solutions at this point in time. The uniqueness even less so. It used to both however.

*Looks at the vBulletin 4 bugs list*. Or the blogs by developers, or some of the non communication or content on vBulletin.com

Aka what vBulletin used to have until Internet Brands bought it. Funny this coming from the guy with one blog post on vBulletin.com and hardly any activity on his own network of sites.

See above posts.

I guess Internet Brands and vBulletin Solutions aren't meeting his checklist then?

 

You know what they say, "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS". That's the moniker of most of corporate America these days...and has been for the last nearly 30 years.

 

Looks to me like he is just paving the way for releasing disappointing earnings.

 

still hasn't approved my comment...
oh well, right on par as far as i care..lol

 

Yeah, I think that blog entry definitely qualifies for the "Most Corporate Speak Crammed Into A Few Paragraphs Without Saying Anything" award.

In all seriousness though, I wonder if the part that Abomination bolded explains why were are seeing releases with bugs that were fixed in a prior version now broken again. It was happening during the alpha/beta versions and seemed to happen again with the 4.0.1 release.

 

Whats the aim of this pic anyway? He tells he loves planes or travel? or just fly as high again?

 

He is trying to go for the Richard Branson look (Virgin Atlantic), Branson had a similar picture for an ad once. I posted the 2 pictures together a few months ago somewhere.

 

Looks like he's trying to give the impression that he's a high flyer (maybe he is). I do think a lot of you here need a wake-up call (and a big one at that). When are you going to grasp the fact that Internet Brands is a money making machine, and that's all their interested in (money). All vBulletin is to them, is another venture of many to make money from and nothing more. It it fails in the future, they'll simply sell it on most likely.

 

If its a money making machine - its broke.

Why does everyone grief business as 'money making greedy destroyers of all things good'? Do any of you work for free? Does that make you greedy if you don't?

Business is supposed ot make money just like people are. In fact, if the business doesn't make money than the people working for it sure as hell can't. The problem that has occurred has nothing to do with business, it has to do with:

-Poor management
-Poor vision
-Poor communication
-Poor planning

Sorry, but I just get antsy with the mentality that corporations are evil and only break things to extract money out of them. Good businesses extract maximum value and profit by doing the exact opposite of the list above.