One of the nice benefits to having a blogging gig is how many books I get sent to me by publishers and PR firms representing publishers and authors. I actually read about 1/2 of them but rarely do I write a review, probably because I feel a little bit of conflict in the sense of obligation to write something positive about something someone gives me. I don't know, maybe I just subconsciously feel that I won't get any more free books if I go negative on them.
One book that I have no problem writing something good about is The Real Story of Informix Software and Phil White, by Steve Martin. I really enjoyed reading this book and as someone who "came of age" in that crazy time of the early to mid 1990's I felt that this account tied up a lot of loose ends for me.
The book starts out by covering the event that almost killed Informix, the acquisition of Innovative Software. You may recall that this company had a killer spreadsheet program called Wingz and Informix believed that there future was in desktop productivity. This misfortunate acquisition heralded the arrival of Phil White who was brought in to clean things up.
If you know Phil you know that this guy is the prototypical competitor with uncanny leadership abilities. People like Phil and want to be around him, and he knows how to run an enterprise software company, and the book does go into a lot of detail about how Phil positioned Informix and measured performance.
Some of these lessons still ring true today, such as:
We learned another important lesson. If we were not in the deal from the very beginning, we would most likely lose because we didn't have a relationship with the customer. Therefore, even though we were battling Oracle and Sybase on a daily basis, our real enemy was time. We wasted it working on dealswere we didn't belong in the first place."
Also recounted in this book are some of the decisions that brought to an end the database wars of the 90's, such as Sybase's acquisition of Powersoft.
Lot's of discussion about row level locking, and if you lived through it you will recall what a huge deal this was, ultimately bringing down Sybase because they didn't have it. The lesson here is that sometimes it's not a matter of having it or not having it, but when you have it that counts.
Of course, Informix went on to some monsterous misses that ended up costing Phil his job, and in the subsequent revelations and earnings restatements that went on to legal proceedings culminating in some jail time for Phil. I can't excuse breaking the law, but such outcomes also don't diminish the fact that Phil rescued a company that was on the bring of obscurity and even today I look at his leadership skills with admiration.
The book does a good job of covering the downfall and lessons learned from Phil's fall from grace, as well as anyone could have. I ended up taking a lot away from this book, a lot more than simply "Phil built up the company, broke the law, went to jail".
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