A most interesting perspective off the Yahoo board:
I am a stockholder who is in employed this marketplace. I have been evaluating CS
personally for the some time now, here are my observations:
Technical expertise is quite competitive in both Product Engineering and Sales
Engineering. The Rochestor engineering group appears to be correctly focused on
their development. The addition of the DEC engineering team brings alot of
experience but my interactions with this group has been underwhelming. Their
process is cumbersome and the NIH prejudice comes across quite plainly.
The New Products are excellent, well thought out and quite price driven. I include
both the East Coast stuff and the Yago and Netva products. From a product
offerring perspective they are doing well.
Marketing: A Challenge, I have been presented to quite a bit lately by these folks and
the message is not clean, the market strategy of "best of breed" is in my opinion
flawed. If I am managing a large network, I want ONE point of contact to manage. I
do not want Craig to tell me it's Cisco or 3Com's problem. I need to make one call
and kill the problem.I cannot do this with the Best of Breed philosphy. The other
problem is that I as a customer am resource limited, I cannot possibly devote the time
to evaluate a multi-vendor solution. The other challenge with marketing is that the
folks are to JUNIOR and are unable to effect policy within the company. The culture
of CS is confrontational for better or for worse it is an aggressive enviornment. I have
not met one Marketing type that has the skill to defeat a confrontational attack. ( It
can be done, I have seen it done by other internal organizations).
The Culture: A real tough one on many levels, As I stated before the culture is
Managment by confrontation and exploiting interdeparmental errors and publicizing
them. Every "senior" manager (it is tough because u cannot tell from the titltes as to
who is what) mentions Craigs name every other breath. As a potential customer I will
tell u this makes me nervous about how much direct control Craig has in the day to
day stuff. The managment I have met for the most part are proffessional(there are
comical exceptions) and should have the leeway to execute, but they do not. Every
issue is a Craig issue, every question is a Craig question, every answer is a Craig
answer. If I were Craig, I would be most unhappy with this.
The Channel: Confused currently. Appears to be infighting over direct vs. vars etal. It
should be interesting to see who wins this. I give DeAugust even money right now.
Stock Price: Is in my opinion a reflection of the culture. Craig spends WAY to much
time dealing with the huge volume of day to day stuff that occurs in every company
this size. Consequently he cannot possibly focus because his senior team will not (or
cannot) make decsions that drive the company and the vision. Consequently the
managment of the analysts and stock price take a distant third to dealing with all of
the stuff his team should be doing. Craig is a dynamic person, if he were allowed (or
would let himself) devote the time to evangilising his company there is no doubt that
this stock would be in the 20's today. As a manager he needs to grow most of all by
letting go and demanding accountability of his senior team. The Craig says this and I
talked to Craig and Craig told me conversations I get from his team is really quite
unnerving.
My appologies for the length of this post, I believe this stock will comeback (hey
look at Unisys) but it needs to recalibrate its culture quickly. The culture is hurting the
company, not the products....
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