I am finding it hard to stay away from blogging. Perhaps it just gets under your skin in ways that are hard to stop. But in any case the reason I began my public commentaries was severe irritation over how things were being run under Siemens with SE. I still find I get irritated and still have things to say. It is not quite right to just post comments on others forums or blogs and so this blog seems to continue. Reading things today online prompted today’s post as I pondered the rarity of qualified people and the result of this. The rarity of good ideas and good management. Here we have Corporate Managers and Movers and Shakers chasing good things with invariably poor results.
Worthy of mention here is the maxim that the buck stops somewhere. I think that considering how ineffective Siemens marketing is at least where Solid Edge is concerned and knowing some of the leader ship of Solid Edge I can only conclude one thing. Their hands are being tied by corporate leadership above them who do not see any advantage in explosive growth. My opinion is that SE was bought as part of a package and that Siemens really does not care what happens here. The only thing I can conclude here based upon what I have heard and observed through actions taken is that Siemens is taking profits from SE and using them for other purposes. Perhaps to make less than stellar balance sheets in other divisions look better as they aggregate all profits and throw them into this Siemens gray corporate bag of ambiguities whereby success can be punished by having their generated profits skewed sideways to cover for those less capable.
Make no mistake here if Siemens decided to allow SE sufficient funding out of the money Solid Edge earns on it’s own merits and free reign to do things right their profits as a corporation called Siemens would be better and the subset called Solid Edge would be dramatically better. And it would be completely self funding from the proceeds from Solid Edge. But they don’t because somewhere some MBA CPA type idiot has decided that his prudent management metric should prevail over logic. Please note here that no CAD or CAM company was ever started by an MBA or CPA. Please note that no MBA or CPA has cut chips or designed products as coders or workers and they lack true insight into both what it is they manage and how it and their customers function in the real world. But somehow these disconnected gurus of fiscal wisdom get to dictate to those who know their products how things will be. Remember when leaders of tech companies used to be engineers? They were people who could and would over-ride bad policies when they saw them as being detrimental to their products. But today we have 90 day windows of MBA CPA placation of institutional shareholders and logic and prudence are out the window. So we have a generous helping of Corporate Siemens stupidity where SE is concerned as once again SE is plundered by MBA and CPA types whose last concern is for their paying on the ground customers. I know SE is profitable but I believe capital that is generated by SE is once again being syphoned off to do CYA for corporate interests. It is kind of funny how things work. A sales guy is promised a 10% commission on his sales. This is fine until he reaches say a million dollars and then all of a sudden he is only worth 5%. So the MBA CPA idiots break their contractural promise and a great sales guy leaves. The CPA MBA idiots then start over with the sales guys list and a new guy who gets the same promises. Repeat and recycle and you have the environment SE operates in. You can only show so much profit before we come in there and take it from you.
By the way, for those of you who email me with comments. Karsten Newbury is NOT the problem and has never been. It is those above him. It is entrenched Siemens corporate policies and things like Marketing and PR departments that do not answer to him and he can’t enforce change upon. Personally I would hate to be in his shoes. A brilliant product with a tremendous world beating potential run by a guy with industrial degrees who understands the product and its uses who is relegated to also ran status by those who have no clues but own the shoestrings. He has been a true firewall against dumb policies and I dread the day they finally run him off. And they will if this continues I fear. Can anyone say SolidWorks Two? Dassault eventually ran their bright people off too.
This is the only thing that can adequately explain to me why SE languishes in never never land and is not #1. The tremendous technical capabilities are now as they have been seemingly since the beginning. Sold down the river by those who have no clue of the gold mine they own. I struggle to think of a term here for leadership that has the best gold mine out there according to provable reserves and yet insists on turning in third rate results because they refuse to allow the mine to buy self funded new mining equipment. Looney bin logic #101 as a prerequisite before admittance to MBA CPA #101 I suppose.
Now this is quite a sideways shift from the above but what started all this today was going over to the Ironcad site. They send me tons of emails and today for the heck of it I went there. And for the heck of it I went to the partners section as considering the goofy implementation of this at Siemens controlled SE I wanted to see what Ironcad had. So I have a look at their solution partners and I see
ProCam 2 has as it’s newest web listing something from 2006. Visualmill is on version 2014 and I figure V4 is probably six or seven years out of date to. Once again website gurus strike right to the heart of the matter with complete and accurate information as an example of their dedication to their jobs. I think there must be a special source of bottled designer water these Marketing and PR people are force fed no matter who their employers are. And a minimum daily quantity must be consumed by each marketing or PR employee per upper corporate management directives so they can spout off things like 500% better and 200% quicker and 300% increases in productivity and never have to fear the burden of accuracy in whatever they do. Never have to worry about updating content or living up to promises. Siemens appears to be the predominate bottler of this fine product.
Sometimes I wish I knew less than I do about what goes on behind the scenes. There are things I wish I had never read. All this accumulated stupidity and inaccuracy and patronizing junk turned out by Marketing and PR at upper management behest just give me a sour opinion of the whole thing and it did not have to be this way. And it IS upper management because the buck stops there.
By the way. I am now going to refer to SE as Siemens controlled Solid Edge. If Solid Edge was left to it’s own devices and Karsten could run it the way he knows how to, without inteference from Siemens, it would be #1 in sales by now. So to commemerate the Siemens interference in what could and should be they deserve to have mention. Each and every time. Celebrate the failure of Siemens controlled Solid Edge as it takes it’s corporate assigned place in life anywhere but as #1. WAY to go Siemens. And stop sending bottled water to Ironcad. They probably would not appreciate it if they knew what you were doing.
Machined Audio Horn Lens 