I worked at Gandalf Technologies during the 80's and early 90's, and saw a company that had once risen to success under the leadership of technical co-founder Colin Patterson wither and die when he left the company in the non-technical hands of Des Cunningham. A tech company cannot be run by non-technical management.
We back-room engineers had some insider acronym jokes about the ISDN which we (unlike the MBA types) believed was to be short-lived, based on new advances on the technological horizon. For example "Innovations Subscribers Don't Need", " I Still Don't kNow", and of course to reflect the stock hype "I Smell Dollars Now!".
Unfortunately by the time Gandalf management morons began to realize they were in trouble and tried to jump on the new techologies bandwagon it was too late. Others had made the market inroads first, and Gandalf lost it's earlier role as a technology leader and became a 'me too' outfit instead.
Even when offered a brand-new technology called 'CDDI' which was initially invented in Gandalf labs and showed the promise of 100 Mb/s (10 times the then 10Base-T ethernet data rate available in 1989) on metallic cable instead of expensive optical fibre, Gandalf management turned this down since "nobody else was doing it", "too risky", "cannot require a special cable", and of course the initial research to prove the technical feasibility was an unauthorized back-of-the-lab project that management had not been aware of and thus would not justify. Typical MBA technical ignorance.
But we all know what happened after that - we published the test results, Crescendo Communications then jumped in and continued to pioneer the CDDI concept and were bought by Cisco Systems, CDDI evolved into the 100Base-T ethernet physical layer, and Cisco profitted immensely. Gandalf Technologies went bankrupt. It could have been so different if not for inept management.
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