Good to see they have the obligatory high-tech lawsuit under their belts, they are in excellent company in that regard, and it's often a bullish signal. You are right about being a failure though, and there are two core reasons for that: extremely poor software development and integration process, and a completely unfocused management. The idea that you can go out and buy this and that, then wrap it up and ship it demonstrates mind-boggling stupidity. What they need to do is develop a set of core assets in the form of plug-in components, then build quality applications around those components at a fraction of the cost. It's sounds simple, but the supply of unskilled, stupid or lazy software developers is at an all-time high. When you add to that management of an equal caliber, you get Quarterdeck.
They used to have the most elegantly designed system available for PC's in their DeskView operating systems, and some of the offshoot technology is still available today, such as QEMM. Where they went wrong is buying a bunch of unpolished crap-ware, maintaining it all independently, and just dumping whatever they could unload on the market. Apparently, this hasn't worked. A couple of good techno-logical managers and they could turn this thing around. |
