The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Cube Farm

Does anybody know who this firm is? The article won't tell you.

"By the way, this didn't simply apply to the course, but to the source code itself. Sometime in the past someone had written a program that stepped through the company's key code programs and removed all the comments and documentation from millions of lines of code."

http://www.softwaremarketsolution.com

JustCurious
Monday, February 16, 2004

Absolutely no grounds for this, but matching facts based on his article it looks like Lawson Software, Inc.:

Quotes from the article:
"When I lived and worked in Minnesota..."
"As soon as the founders got enough money to retire (read IPO), the long knives came out and the blood flowed. This was all during the post-9/11 downturn, which I'm sure added insult to injury."
"Business software, primarily ERP stuff aimed at many verticals."
http://www.internetnews.com/fina-news/article.php/936311
http://profitsjournal.com/story.asp?storyid=273

Regarding the layoffs, many around the time that the interviewee mentions:
http://www.google.com/search?q=lawson+software+layoff

Just a stab in the dark, and all without any guarantees, I don't work with any ERP vendors, or have anything against Lawson Software. I just did a few google searches for 'minnesota erp ipo' and I didn't find any other companies that matched the clues in the article.

Andrew Hurst
Monday, February 16, 2004

Ah, a little more...

from the article:
"For instance, one family member decided to create his own "fiefdom" within the company and called it "The Advanced Technology Group.""

and from the following link, talking about Lawson:
"Even most of the so called "Advanced Technology Group" is trapped in that batch oriented mainframe world without an API to bail them out."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen/lawson_architecture.html

The person in the above link doesn't seem to happy with Lawson either...

Andrew Hurst
Monday, February 16, 2004