Hi Geoff,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
FYI, the bank I referred to, which has long since disappeared through
merger, had about 20,000 employees. About half of those were overseas, in one
of the 50 or so countries in which we had offices. I don't know how many
of the 20,000 worked in IT, but would guess at least 2-3,000. Even that
many wasn't enough to keep up with growing needs, as I and my management
colleagues in the user departments knew only too well.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that T-T has resources of that magnitude.
It is, however, a larger company than Elecraft, and look at what Elecraft
has done. Now that John Henry is back at T-T, I'm hoping that he will be
able to help them regain a competitive position in the high-performance
radio market. The O II, after all, is T-T's flagship radio product, and a lot
of the company's reputation rides on it.
73 Ray W2RS
In a message dated 4/15/2010 7:15:46 P.M. GMT Standard Time,
geoffreymendelson@gmail.com writes:
On Apr 15, 2010, at 6:14 PM, Rsoifer@aol.com wrote:
>
> The possible saving grace in the O II situation might be that we are
> "only" dealing with 10K lines of code, rather than millions in the
> banking
> situation. Rather than trying to fix the existing firmware, might
> it make more
> sense just to treat the O II as an empty hardware platform, and
> write an
> altogether new system?
I think that you would find there are a lot more lines of code in the
O2 firmware, and each one does a lot more than whatever was used in
your banking situation. Your bank probably had hundreds of programers
to maintain, test and develop code, Ten Tec at best had (has) a handful.
In the 1990's when I was a computer consultant, I had one bank that
had a single programmer on staff. They bought a banking package that
was complete, and cost more per year than a house. Obviously the
company that provided it had many programmers, testers, etc.
The reality of the situation is that at $4000 or so the the O2 is
cheap. If it were sold as commerical or military equipment, it would
cost $10k-$20k and if it ended up in the ISS probably close to $100k.
If it were sold by CISCO or another similar company, you would get
annual firmware updates, but you would be paying $1k yearly support
contract. No contract, no firmware. If Ten Tec did something to make
sure firmware for my radio did not load on yours so that I could not
"gift" you mine, because you don't have a contract, it would be a
normal practice in the computer business.
Companies that gave away free software updates to their commerical
routers, such as Baycomm, have long since disapeared. A calculation by
the WSJ of thieir stock price in their last year of business was that
if you bought $1,000 of Bud in cans or $1,000 of Baycomm stock, in a
year the deposit on the cans was worth more than the stock.
I buy routers from a company called EDIMAX. They are $50-$75 each, and
come with lifetime free sofware updates. In reality, they issue two or
three of them in the "lifetime" of the product, then they tell you to
buy a new model. The same with another cheap company TP-Link, whose
routers are now $30, but the last update on theirs was 2 years ago,
athough that model is still on sale. If you want current updates, you
have to buy a $75 model.
Linksys (which is really CISCO) and D-Link have similar polices. Two
or three updates and goodbye.
Sun used to give away software patches and small user licenses for
their operating system. They kept loosing money, and were bought out
by Oracle, who now requires service contracts and limits free licenses
to 90 days. Sun was about to file bankruptcy, probably by the end of
the year, Oracle is not in any such danger.
Sure you could get better software support, but be prepared to pay for
it. As for re-writing the code, forget it.
AFAIK software engineers are cheap in the area Ten-Tec is, as long as
you don't have to buy someone from silicon valley. A really top-notch
developer of embeded code could easily demand salaries of $300k-$500k
depending upon the job, the company and the options, even in this
economy.
At the height of "the bubble" the average income of a programmer in
Seattle was $400k including bonuses and stock options. It's probably
now half that, but that was all programmers at all levels, not the top
end of the embedded software guys.
That would mean if you wanted Ten-Tec to hire a program to work soley
on the O2 issues and $1k of the price of the radio was software, they
would have to sell 200 to 300 a year just to cover his salary. Or if
they wanted to do the same by subscriptions, they would have to sell
that many at that price,
or if you wanted $100 a year subscriptions, 3000. More like 5000 to
cover all costs.
Just to put it in perspeciive, the average salary of the programmers
at the bank is probably around $100k, and if they live in a high cost
of living area, closer to $150k. That means there are some that make
$60, and some that make $150, aren't you sorry that when you worked
for that bank, you did not take the free programming classes they
offered?
73,
Geoff.
--
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson@gmail.com
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge
or understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the
situation. i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found
in the Wikipedia.
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