So when did the knives come out at Seagate?
To lose one C-level exec may be regarded as a misfortune...
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Comment To lose two CxO-level officers in one day is exceptional, even by Seagate standards. Last week's axing of CEO Bill Watkins and the resignation of COO David Wickersham resembled a day of the long knives in Scotts Valley. So how did it come to this?
The events timeline looks like this:
1. At a Barclays Capital analysts' conference on December 10 Watkins and CFO Pat O'Malley talked of Seagate's need, because of the recession, to learn how to make a profit as a $2bn/quarter revenue company, down from the $3bn/quarter company they had become accustomed to. The company was already in the midst of a restructuring (cost-reduction) exercise.
2. Before CES in Las Vegas, Watkins and the board met. This was in the knowledge of a reduced expectation for the final calendar '08 quarter of revenue in the $2.3bn - $2.6bn range (SEC filing Dec 10). They agreed a rough 10 per cent headcount cut, where budget would be spent and where it would be saved.
3. At CES up to and including Friday, both Watkins and Seagate's consumer business president, Brian Dexheimer, spoke fairly freely and said that December revenues had gone off a cliff, that a 10 per cent staff cut was coming, that, in Watkins's view, this was now the time to press ahead with innovation so that you could build market share in the recovery period after the recession, and that he saw no sense in buying Fujitsu's distressed hard disk drive business. There would be/should be more HDD industry consolidation and maybe the Fujitsu HHD business, TDK and Toshiba might form a second Japanese HDD supplier alongside Hitachi GST.
There were no signs that Watkins was contemplating resigning. However, the December revenue figures - flagged as surprisingly bad by Watkins - could conceivably have meant that the final quarter's revenues were going to drop below $2bn.
4. Here we start speculating; over the weekend of January 10 and 11 the Seagate board must have conferred. Someone must have said that they thought Seagate could do something different, and that maybe Seagate could have done better. The company could cut costs more deeply and concentrate more on conserving cash than on continuing product development and innovation to be poised for market capture when the recession ended.
So we can imagine a board consensus about the need for this and an approach to Watkins: "Bill, we think you should cut deeper and spend less on innovation." Watkins may have said no.
Next page: Sentiment turned
COMMENTS
@James O'Brien
Heh, I stand corrected. The correct figure is 7,200, but hey, it's about right for a Register comment!
And you didn't give the correction, just pointed the finger so Nyah Nyah to you too :-)
Raptor, raptor...
Never understood the fascination with 'raptors. If you're keen on speed, opt for striped RAID. Even with a semi-decent controller cards and 2 drives, it's still cheaper than the equivalent raptor.
Lessons Lost on the Board...
The unfortunate problem with the Seagate Board is that they refuse to acknowledge that a global recession has occurred and that is when innovation investments should go up, not down. With this strategy, corporate can be prepared to kick butt when the economy recovers. At the same time, Seagate should maintain the current business line and market to the reduced quantity of buyers to continue revenue generation, even at a reduction. Performing a total reorganization and reallocation of manufacturing struction will introduce a major loss in quality, which in turn will cause Segate to lose credibility in the marketplace.
IMHO, this is the beginning of the end for Seagate, just like how Micropolis disappeared in the 1990s.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
