The factors involved were more along these lines:
- The original company from which Cassatt was born, Unlimited Scale, which was suppose to be a cash cow that was to fund the cloud computing development was a bust, producing no real revenue (thus additional funding was required). The 50 odd people that came with Unlimited Scale have few skills that were transferrable to building enterprise grade software.
- Three development sites with 3 types of developers and development styles producing quite a bit of internal angst.
- A “go big or go home” sales model. If a customer did not present a million dollar plus contract opportunity it was not pursued. Such contracts take time to close and the associated customers demand changes since no product perfectly fits each specific need and since they are paying a lot of money they want the changes or contractual obligation for the change before signing the contract (we spent 3 months making changes for NetApp which subsequently decided not to move forward with the contract).
- A continuous rollover over of “top executive talent” who could translate their big company successes to a small company business model – such people are not doers, they are merely sayers.

Agreed. And that’s why change is a “process”. Companies will change policies — look at how SaaS applications caused companies to change their policies around how and where corporate data is stored — but it takes time. It’s always evolutionary and not revolutionary. Cassatt was trying to be revolutionary. A tough battle to fight.

> Huh? Give companies “something radical” and they
> would be willing to “change all their policies” to
> buy Cassatt’s product?

Companies do eventually change their policies, but definitely not fast enough to make a sale.

I also thought it was funny that he was essentially talking about something radical with a good track record. I’m not sure how to manage that, because “radical” often means “too new to have a track record.”