Vernier Networks – “Go somewhere else if you want your product to be successful.”

Pros

You will get to touch a wide varieity of tools and technologies. The tools are reasonably good and at one point there was the money to select best of breed (within reason) tools. An example would be the use of Perforce (but not Clearcase).

Cons

The never ending search for a problem to apply the solution to. The product is very much an engineers swiss army knife, but overwhems the customera and the support people. The engineering staff (all but the current exec staff) put too much of a wall between engineering and everyone else and fostered an us versus them attitude.

Advice to Senior Management

Pick the 60% of the product that 95% of the customers use and focus on that. The software legacy product was of limited success but if it had 1/2 the resources of the hardware product invested in it then it would have been smoking.