** Hot News **
Sue Dunnell leaves SAP
PowerBuilder product manger Sue Dunnell has left SAP according to Matt Balent - North Carolina PowerBuilder User Group president. Sue has been PowerBuilder's product manager ever since Sybase took over the product from its original creator PowerSoft. Apparently, Sue has decided to pursue other opportunities outside SAP.The PB Community wishes Sue all the best in her new endeavors.
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Regards ... Chris
HOT and sad news.... :(
ReplyDelete/Georgios
Could that be the Final Blow? Only time will tell...
ReplyDeleteI am very sad to say that "it was about time"...
ReplyDeletePowerBuilder from year to year was loosing it's force due to bad management decisions.
How can you have the best RAD business tool in your hands and fail big time? over and over the years continuously...
I hope someone that is more technical and knows what the market wants from a tool to be successful will take over...
Your are 100% "on the money" with the bad product management. That aspect started well over 10 years ago at Sybase and slowly contributed to PB's technical lead being eroded away. A great PM needs product "vision", "technical insight", "conviction", "intuition", etc to ensure a products health - things which which were not apparent from my perspective.
DeleteHere we go again. Pointing fingers at the wrong people.
DeleteNo amount of knowledge and understanding on a product and its market can overcome senior management's refusal to fund its continued development.
PowerBuilder hasn't fallen off because of Sue Dunnell -- in fact, if you talk to anyone inside Sybase (now SAP) that knows PB, they'll tell you the complete opposite: if it wasn't for Sue Dunnell, PB would have been dead a long time ago. If you want affirmation of that, ask John Strano or Paul Horan. Even better, ask Dave Fish who is no longer a SAP employee, and can make his own feelings known without losing his job :)
I am sure that Paul, John & Dave liked Sue. Granted, poor senior management is a real problem but being friends with Raj Nathan and John Chen, I can tell you that funding was not the PB issue for many years.
DeleteWhile I am sure that Sue was a really nice person to work with personally .,, she was also a great "Schmoozer". These type of people know how to play the system, say the right words, surround themselves with people who know what they are doing, etc. They can last along time in a decaying situation but by no means do they have the leadership to turn the situation around.
Cases in point: 1) At our OSUG meetings Sue would sit at the back of the room on her phone and PC and hardly engage the attendees; 2) At last years Charlotte conference she sat in a corner of the reception hall and never sat at any tables during lunch to engage the audience; 3) I have never seen Sue do a PB webinar demonstrating PB; 4) I have never seen sue at a Techwave up on stage demoing PB; 5) I have never seen Sue demo PB period (pretty sure that she couldn't technically).
Now lets look at other people like CEO Armeen Mazda, Brian Le Sur CEO of Zynex, etc who demo their products all the time, hold webinars, etc. Then there are product managers like Reed Shiltz (PocketBuilder), Dave Dichmann (PowerDesigner) at Sybase/SAP who demoed their products live, at Techwave on stage, webinars, etc and were visionary speakers for their products. In no way did I ever see Sue champion PB like that, nor demonstrate vision, leadership or any in-depth technical understanding of PB that a typical PM would (IMHO) need to have to be proactive.
PB was in a downhill road for more than 10 years...
ReplyDeleteI can't understand how the product manager was not affected at all?
Who was to blame then? (There should be always someone to blame...in these situations)
Each release of PB didn't deliver the functionality nor controls needed to be competitive.
And when it delivered it was already far overdue...
PB.Net WPF was great but came toooooo late, when everyone else where "jumping" off the WPF world we where introduced to WPF!! What a bummer!!
The latest PB12.6 offers docking windows when this should be available at least 8 years before!
I can keep writing and writing ...I love PB and I am very disappointed how the management failed when they had this "gold" in their hands...
The only way PB can be again competitive is to deliver a true web solution (.Net + HTML5 Datawindow + javascript. ...etc) in a PB project environment.
Sybase was an odd entity, in that for some products, Product Management had no real connection to engineering. In PB's case, engineering tended to deliver what they wanted to engineer, not what customers were asking for. I know, it's hard to fathom, but it's how it was.
DeleteThat has and IS one of PB's BIG problems - NO direct customer (ie: real developer) engagement and ... its not that the PB Community has not been asking for that for over a decade either.
DeleteSAP's latest closed beta testing and then last minute re-branding PB 15 to 12.6 just before GA was a real "slap in the face" as far a customer engagement is concerned IMHO.