October 6, 2006

Credit for inventions incorrectly credited or How companies go bad

Category: Work, Technology, Software development, Entrepreneur — by Amit Chaudhary @ 11:58 pm

As part of writing about the Amazon Data Center management tool Maya, Storage Mojo which is an excellent and a unique storage blog contains details about credit for inventions in Amazon being incorrectly distributed or rather being falsely attributed to others.

I cannot be sure of the above case, but from Brocade days, it brought back memories. Brocade had few good practises and many bad ones. In Brocade, on patent applications, names of managers and others were added who had nothing to do with inventions except maybe manage the engineers who created it and sometimes not even that. Some actual examples.

Publication US20040028063: For patent “Host bus adaptor-based virtualization switch”, which has everyone from the VP, Managers to Hardware engineer’s names, but created and work done by Subhojit and Naveen.

Publication US20040030857: For patent “Hardware-based translating virtualization switch has 11 inventors, but was never created and was the idea of 2-3 software engineer and 1-2 hardware engineers.
Once this behavior sets in a company, it is a short way from the disease going in deeper and creating more and more problems. For example, when Brocade was doing due diligence on the smart switch company, Rhapsody Networks, none of the real experts(doing Virtualization) were called in. The result, an acquistion that did not produce a product for more than a year, resulted in acquisition money being held by Brocade due to milestones not being met, the Rhapsody VCs suing Brocade in return and atleast four rounds of layoffs some of which due to this.
Incorrect credit is a good indicator of a company going bad……

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