Software industry hijinks
The approach of April Fool’s Day has me thinking of software industry pranks and other hijinks. Most of what comes to mind is verbal jousting of various sorts that doesn’t really fit the theme. But there was one case in which ongoing business competition got pretty prankish: mainframe-era accounting software leaders MSA vs. McCormack & Dodge.
Even today, a significant amount of marketing and sales is done at vendor-run seminars in medium-quality hotels. But in those days, before the internet and hence in particular before webinars, a huge fraction of all sales cycles passed through a physical seminar-attendance step. So if you could disrupt your competitors’ seminars, you could disrupt their whole sales cycles. So M&D and MSA salespeople did just that, routinely calling hotels to outright cancel competitors’ reservations and events. If I had to name offenders’ names, I’d start with Mary Kohler at McCormack & Dodge and Roe Henson at MSA, but I’m pretty sure the men were even “worse.”*
*Truth be told, I think the whole thing was pretty funny, or else I wouldn’t be sharing it. Further, I emphatically think Mary and Roe should be admired for succeeding in what was then an extremely male world.
That story has been confirmed multiple times, with minor variations (biggest disagreement = which side started doing it first). More dramatic stories are less confirmed. My favorite of those is MSA arranging for a McCormack & Dodge contract signing to be disrupted by the M&D salesman’s arrest for delinquent child support. (Ouch!) Other confirmed examples I can think of are tame by comparison, like the blow-up dolphins the MySQL folks decorated the Sun campus with after their acquisition closed.* E.g., sending trucks with hiring or marketing messages outside your competitors’ conferences or office buildings is not very imaginative, and actually happens in lots of industries.
*Sun apparently had a major tradition of MIT-style April Fool’s pranks, one of which featured Scott McNealy’s car being stranded in – or rather on – the middle of a pond. But that’s a little outside my purview.
But one I’ve always loved is the tradition of witty product code names. Some of my favorites were from the days of the Borland/Lotus spreadsheet competition, including:
- Conan, because Borland CEO Philippe Kahn prided himself on Borland being “barbarians”
- Crom, the god Conan prayed to (quite so – I’ve read the books)
- Buddha, because Borland wanted to assume “the Lotus position” (one of my favorite puns ever)
Another pair comes from when John Landry, then McCormack & Dodge’s R&D chief, was developing a proprietary programming language, which he planned both to use for in-house development and to expose to users for their own customizations. (I.e., it was a forerunner of SAP’s ABAP and PeopleSoft’s PeopleTools.) The first codename was GLOP (General Language for Ordinary People). That was eventually replaced by SLOB (Simple Language for Ordinary Bozos). To the best of my knowledge, those code names never made it into any actual product documentation. 😉
I think I’ll stop there. I do have other stories of wise-assery I could add, but I think I’ll hold them back until I’m ready to take the time to wrap them in a bit of context …
Edit: Maybe I’ll add more here as I think of them.
- Larry Ellison, Mitchell Kertzman, and David Roux did a hilarious site spoofing the dotcom bubble. Unfortunately, it only persists in incomplete Internet Archive form, but that’s enough to show the key point.
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9 Responses to “Software industry hijinks”
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[…] thinking about this post, I recalled and posted about some software industry pranks. The MSA/M&D ones still boggle my mind, but I couldn’t think of much else to match them. […]
Correction: Mary Kohler worked for McCormack & Dodge and Roe Henson for MSA. Roe later worked for Dun & Bradstreet Software, the merged company and went on to Peoplesoft. I do not recall Mary ever canceling any reservations, but know she was a victim a couple of times. I have never heard the store about a contract signing interruption for child-support and doubt its veracity. Then again, McCormack & Dodge did have contract signings.
Steve
Steve,
Ack!!! I had a typo in which I called both firms “M&D”, then corrected in the wrong order. Fixing now.
The child-support story is supposedly about Don House (MSA’s sales chief himself), calling in the cops on an M&D salesman. I agree that that one is dubious.
As for who did what to whom — I’m not surprised that your memories are a little different from what I recall being told by Roe. 😉
Thanks,
CAM
One more for you Curt http://www.ramonchen.com/?p=2854
(sorry couldn’t resist)
My recollection, which may be faulty after all these years, was that John Imlay was the author of many of these stories. John had the ability, skill, to take virtually anything and turn it into an engaging and humorous story. Each year I was with MSA..some of my most memorable, period…there was an animal theme. Such as our competitors are a bunch of monkey’s. Someplace, I still have a photo of myself and my date and the monkey between us. I wonder if Roe remembers going to to C/U for a Fighting Illini football game with me.
GLOP actually did make it into production! It was the command use to “optimize” an online screen when it was created or changed.
I worked for M&D starting in 1979 in San Diego and then, Los Angeles. We would have sales seminars for leads and prospects in hotels.
One day, a prospect came up to his sales rep and said, ‘hey, what’s that MSA salesman doing here?’. The MSA sales rep had registered with a bogus company name.
That was pretty bold. After that, the seminar coordinator suggested that we call to confirm registration for each attendee.
There were also cases of stealing seminar attendees lists, other sneaky tactics. Ah, the bad old days….
I was with McCormack and Dodge in the 1980s, working on their manufacturing systems (PIOS). I recall a sales demonstration in the Chicago office to Libby Owens Ford (I think). We knew that some of the software really didn’t work, so we rehearsed the demo so that we got to the cruddy bit at 12.25 precisely. We scheduled the pizza delivery (and the cold beer, naturally) to arrive at 12.25, shouted out “The pizza’s here” – and neatly skipped all the stuff that didn’t work.
My colleagues in crime included the likes of Dick Place, Julie Faught, Duane Kovachick (sp?) and others.
I worked for M&D from 1982-86 in Dallas. There was definitely some intense competition on the sales side with MSA. I was a technical pre-sales”demo dolly” and participated in many sales meetings. The development tool “GLOP” was eventually named M:SDT – Millennium (the name for the CICS based IBM mainframe environment – VSAM based) that the Financial and HRMS products ran on, SDT for System Development Tool. It was considered a 4:GL Language and was pretty powerful and easy to use. M&D also marketed one of the first PC-based analysis tools (PC-Link) that let users download Financial/HR data to Lotus spreadsheets (and later Excel).