I was talking to my boss, the director of my fine library, about the death of Horizon. There have been even more problems between Horizon users and the company of SirsiDynix/Vista recently, and we were bemoaning the apparent insanity of the company. And then.....
Boss: I can't figure out why they would treat their customers so poorly.
Me: Well, they're venture capitalists, right?
B: Right....
M: So they don't think long-term, they think short term. Maybe it would be cost prohibitive to keep their Horizon customers.
B: Too much money spent on training employees to take on the migration of 3,000 customers?
M: Exactly. It would make more sense to keep those customers from migrating, especially since they've committed to not making Horizon customers pay for the "upgrade."
B: So maybe they're not insane at all. Remember, Dynix was Sirsi's biggest competitor until they merged in 2006. Maybe this was Sirsi's plan all along, to kill Dynix by spreading out their customer base when they "merged" Horizon with Unicorn.
M: They're not insane! They're evil geniuses!
Fin
So, yes, I think that we figured out why SD isn't trying to keep its Horizon customers, and in fact seems to be actively trying to get them to leave. Because THEY ARE trying to get us to leave. I can imagine that it would be ridiculously expensive to migrate all those users to a new system, for no cost. They tried to make Horizon folks pay for the migration (which would have spread out that cost), but when the Horizon user group said (rightly) that they shouldn't have to pay for something that they were being forced into, SD backed off and said that it would be free. Well, so much for profits in any way!
Better to let those customers go, dispersed throughout the library world. Even without those customers, SD is the biggest library vendor in the business, and they can build their rep back up. The only major competitor to Sirsi in the past was Horizon, which will now be dead. III isn't really a competitor because it's so expensive. Horizon was always the one that competed most effectively with Sirsi, and within a few years, Horizon will be dead. Pretty smart, eh?
Monday, December 10, 2007
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4 comments:
I've always thought that Stephen Abram looked like an evil genius...
symposium.uah.edu/images/Stephen Abram.jpg
I can just picture him with a curly black mustache, a monocle and a stove pipe hat going "Mwwuahahahaha!"
Hey, put that guy next to a set of railroad tracks with a rope, and I won't go anywhere near him. :)
Look one level upstream for the Evil Genius. It's called Vista Equity Partners and they don't give a tinker's damn about customers. They're the ones who killed Horizon 8.0 Don't forget SIRSI was bought by VEP too.
No, no, I understand all that. Honestly, i think that Sirsi is just as in the dark about the whole decision as Horizon. At least, I assume they are, since the Sirsi IP range is one of the top addresses to acces this particular blog post. :)
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