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Perl Programming

ActiveState Founder Steps Aside 157

Posted by chrisd from the if-you-don't-know-perl-you-don't-know... dept.
Lumpish Scholar writes "ActiveState founder Dick Hardt has quit. Or, as the press release puts it, "ActiveState Expands Board & Founder Steps Aside." No reason for the resignation was given, unless you count, "The company is looking to become a $100 million company, and they're looking for someone ... that [sic.] has that experience." ActiveState (profitably!) distributes its own proprietary products, and also both free and commercially supported versions of Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and XSLT, having given back significantly to the free / Open Source communities associated with those languages."
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ActiveState Founder Steps Aside More

ActiveState Founder Steps Aside

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  • "[sic]" (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How pretentious is that. Jeez. Only the MS Word grammar checker cares about the that/which distinction.
    • At least you got the [sic] right. [sic.] with the period is just plainly wrong, not to mention unnecessary.
    • William Strunk, Jr. [bartleby.com] would claw the lid of his coffin were he to read this thread.
    • The distinction between that and which is irrelevant, however.
      (The relevant distinction is between sentient beings (such as
      "someone") and insentient items (such as "something").)
      Granted, we all knew what was meant. Nevertheless, get your
      criticism right, or don't criticise.
  • I've always had problems getting ActiveState Perl to work in Windows. Maybe it was the fault of the OmniHTTPd server, I dunno. Ah well.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • i wonder what you did wrong. worked like a charm for me, although i have always preferred Perl on *NIX machines .....

      maybe you should read the manuel of your http server?
    • If you were doing this now, I'd say go with Cygwin [cygwin.com]. It's a normal build of Perl, from perl sources, and you get the whole Cygnus UNIXalike toolkit. it's very good, I even use WindowMaker from Cygwin as my window manager (it looks really cool). ALl of the CPAN stuff just plugs in easily. Same with ActiveState TCL. I use Cygwin tcl/Tk. It works fine.

      One thing you might have bumped into was the whole braindead "I only know stuff by filename extensions" that the servers used to do in the early days, before IIS even existested.
      • Thanks for the tip :) I'd rather use BASH than cmd.exe any day :)
        • Some random tips...

          1) Make sure you set up your /etc/passwd, I think if you log in locally, it will set it up for you, but if you log in from the net it won't pull in the entire domain (probably for the good). do:
          mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd
          mkpasswd -d -u USERNAME >> /etc/passwd

          2) The Cygwin bash term (like if you go to the start menu and get a bash shell) takes the standard ANSI escape sequences. So you can do the normal PROMPT_COMMAND things and have your cwd in the title in the term window. I love this. Problem is, the termcap doesn't seem to totally jibe with termcaps on the Solaris machines I log in to, so I still have to use XTerms if I want scrolling in say man pages to work right. Set this up in the .bashrc, make sure you have a .bash_profile that sources .bashrc. I found out it's not done automatically.

          3) cygstart (in the cygutils package) is your friend. It's the glue that integrates the Windows and Cygwin sides well. cygstart --open on a Windows App path will open it in a new window. cygstart --open on a doc will open the doc in the app associated with it in Windows. If you pass in paths from cygwin to a windows app, translate the path before. Here, $(cygpath -w unix_style_path) is your other friend.

          4) If you want to open a cygwin app without the attendant DOS window, check out the run [gatech.edu] utility.

          5) Look for "Command Prompt here" on Microsoft web sites. Then open up RegEdit, look for DosHere, and change the command to the path to your bash shell. Then you can open up bash shells in any directory. Nice.
      • I can't wait for the day XFree86/Cygwin will be able to do rootless windows...
      • I found AS perl to be much faster than the one that comes with cygwin.
        Any exploration of the filesystem seemed an order of magnitude faster.
    • I cannot really see how you could manage to have trouble getting any of activestate's offerings to fail to work under Windows. Perhaps you attempted to install the Linux binary distribution?

      Anyway, I hope that ActiveState manages to continue their fine work even in the absence of their chief.

  • The best thing you can do for your company... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 09, 2002 @07:32PM (#4043147)
    is to know when to step aside. Executives don't take note of this fact nearly often enough, especially in high tech. If more had taken such notice and taken action at the appropriate time I doubt we'd be in quite the economic situation we're in now.

  • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aero6dof ( 415422 ) <aero6dof@yahoo.com> on Friday August 09, 2002 @07:32PM (#4043150) Homepage
    Why does every company have to become $100M+ in size. Why can't they grow the market that they serve now? It's this need for disruptively fast riches that's driving the WorldCom silliness. It's really OK to be a small to medium company with steady growth.

    My prediction is that they'll take on huge debts & expenses to try to expand, fail in 90% of their new "expansion" markets, and die completely or settle back to their same growth curve and niche only saddled with several times more debt. Are there any studies on companies trying for excessive growth?

    • To go public (Score:5, Interesting)

      by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Friday August 09, 2002 @08:11PM (#4043358) Homepage Journal
      The basic problem is that to eventually be a public company you need to be of a certain size - N shares times $15/share. Why go public - because you need to be able to pay off the VCs and the founders (all those engineers who worked their butts off for 3 years with the hope of making it big).

      This model for building a tech company has been basicly the only way to create a company here in the US since the 60s - the VCs understand how it works, the execs, the engineers all know how it works. Most of these companys die - maybe 2 out of 10 live to go public - it's the risk you take building a startup - it's also effects the scale of things the VCs try for - they need those 10-20% of BIG successes to pay for all the investments that fail. The basic business model for people starting this sort of company is "we will build a company that's worth something and sell it on the stock market". You make money from an ever increasing stock price.

      Of course it's not the only way to build a company you can start a small company and grow it slowly financing it out of profit - this is really hard to do (I know I've tried :-) - but not impossible - I've known a number of people who've built such companies - you have a completely different model for your business "we will sell the stuff we make and take home part of the profits". You make money from your profits.

      The big advantage of the DIY company is that you can stop growing at any point. Besides, because you're living directly off your profits you don't have to grow for ever to keep making money - you can stop at $1M or $5M or wherever you're comfortable. The big downside is you're probably spending your own (very real) money, not some VCs.

      • For what it's worth, Chick-Fil-A has basically grown this way to be a HUGE company. No debt, not publically traded. All those Chick-Fil-A's you see are OWNED by the corporation, not franchisees. Truett Cathy is a very wealthy man, thank you. And all that without having some VC force him to be open on Sundays! Go figure. :)
      • Why go public - because you need to be able to pay off the VCs and the founders (all those engineers who worked their butts off for 3 years with the hope of making it big).

        I must correct this statement. The engineers who worked their butts off are NOT getting paid back. Yes, there are a few high-profile spectacular successes. But the rule is that top execs keep 75% of the stock for themselves and early investors, and something less than 15% gets distributed to EVERYONE else... including the engineers. The likelihood of the stock becoming even modestly valuable is very low, and the engineers are the last in line when stockholders line up to recoup losses in the event of a failed endeavor. And sadly, these ventures often fail specifically because the execs' desire for short-term gains prevents them from making decisions that would result in a viable long-term business.

        .

        • Re:To go public (Score:2, Interesting)

          by taniwha ( 70410 )
          while I mostly agree with much of what you say - I have to disagree - if you've done the startup thing enough times you know what to negotiate for - and have the contacts to get into a startup early enough to get a big chunk (you know one of those single digit employee number sorts of things - as an engineer I've got way more than 1% a couple of times) - you also know that if you're moderately successfull dilution will occur, the VCs will get there's and chances are it WILL fail. You probably also know when to bail and when to actually pay for stock up front (the tax consequences, AMT and all that stuff)

          One of the sad things about the whole dot-com thing was how incredibly naive people were - when there were people all around them who'd been down this road before

          I've worked a number of startups over the past 20 years - most were moderately successfull, one went public - but like the stock market I've always considered it a risky long-term investment that will one day hopefully pay off.

    • I agree that not every company can or should strive to be a $100M company. I sometimes wonder how many accounting scandals and dot-com companies we would have if there was no such thing as the stock market. What if every company was a privately-owned company? No stock selling scandals, no "cooking the books" for hitting quarterly earnings estimates, and no underwater stock options.

      I guess this is almost a philosophical question. What is the PURPOSE of a company? To make money, provide jobs, improve the world, or increase its stock price?

      I mean, what is the REAL value of owning a company's stock? If the company does not pay dividends (such as MSFT), then what am I really buying and selling? Regardless of the dot-com bubble, the stock market still seems mostly like a pyramid scheme..

      • Re:What is the real purpose of a company? (Score:5, Informative)

        by gmhowell ( 26755 ) <gmhowell@gmail.com> on Friday August 09, 2002 @08:31PM (#4043450) Homepage Journal
        The purpose of a corporation historically has been twofold:

        First and foremost, to survive the creator. It's easier to avoid inheretance and contract problems when a founder dies if there is a corporate entity as opposed to individuals.

        Second: separate liability.

        In the case of MSFT and others who don't pay dividends, you are buying a portion of the assets of the company. You assume that through wise action of the company, the company will gain assets, thus you will gain assets.

        But MSFT really should pay some dividends. It would increase the value of their stock, and set a new model that other tech companies would likely be unable to follow, lacking in cash as they are.

        • In the case of MSFT and others who don't pay dividends, you are buying a portion of the assets of the company. You assume that through wise action of the company, the company will gain assets, thus you will gain assets.

          So how or when do I get my share of MSFT's assets? At a going-out-of-business fire sale? When you are hoping the company will survive and grow, the idea of personally gaining my share of MSFT's assets seems quite abstract.

          Dividends make sense because they almost a form of profit-sharing.
      • One of the largest privately held companies in the country is headquartered in my town. Their success (especially as a textile company in a time when the textile industry is in the toilet) has convinced me that the world would be a better place if fewer companies went public. Since stock price isn't an issue, there's no pressure to grow rapidly. As a result, the company has no debt whatsoever. The company is still all about growing and making money, but their goal is sustainable long-term growth. You don't see that in larger, publicly held corporations that are only concerned with the next five years.

        Most importantly, since the company is privately held and run by one family, the company adheres to the personal values of its owners. Corporate executives use shareholders as scapegoats to justify all sorts of sleazy shit. All they have to say is that they're a public corporation and that they have a duty to protect their shareholders investments. If a privately held corporation does something dirty, the owners are held morally accountable. What this means in practical terms is that the company doesn't capriciously lay off workers, and that employees tend to be paid well. One of their factories in Georgia burned down several years ago, and everyone just knew that the workers there would be laid off. However, the company offered everyone a new position in the company and promised to rebuild the factory. You can't expect a publicly held corporation to do something like that just out of principle.

        Steve

        • Thank you. Yours, and others' comments, at least reassure me that I am not the only guy who wondered why the hell a company needs to *grow* all the time in order to be successful. I tend to agree; maybe more companies should be private.

          After all, consider the hypothetical example of a company that employs 20 people, and sells enough each year to break even, or slightly better, after operating and manufacturing expenses, salaries, loan repayments etc etc. Only in a twisted economic system would you consider this situation to be a bad thing. Oh, they can't be successful - they didn't grow! Who gives a shit - they kept their market happy, paid all their creditors and employees, and paid out some Christmas bonus money - what more do you need?

          I guess that's why I am not on Wall Street - my views would be unpopular amongst all the parasites and leeches. After all, that institution could never survive if speculation bit the dust.

          On a related note - anyone care to explain why the *economy* has to grow? I don't mean right now, where we are financially in trouble, but I mean in the abstract. To listen to economists and pundits you'd get the impression that every national economy has to grow, grow, grow all the time, or you're screwed. Why? Let's assume that the population is not blowing up anymore, and that we are happy with our per capita wealth - somebody explain to me why the economy needs to grow?

          Oh wait, I guess I answered my own question - if the economy doesn't grow then the per capita wealth of the top 1% won't increase...

          • Because of a rising population. More people, need more money.
          • On a related note - anyone care to explain why the *economy* has to grow? I don't mean right now, where we are financially in trouble, but I mean in the abstract. To listen to economists and pundits you'd get the impression that every national economy has to grow, grow, grow all the time, or you're screwed. Why?

            If workforce population is stable and real productivity is growing at 2% per year then a stable gdp would imply unemployment were increasing at just under 2% per year. So for example if you assume we started with 5% unemployment and this lasted 10 years at the end you'd have 22% unemployment which is fairly close to what we had at the height of the great depression.

            So in real life country (or where this happens a lot in the US is towns) with a stable level of output is either rapidly losing working population or is experiencing almost no increase in productivity.

            Only very conservative societies will tolerate stable levels of productivity.
          • "On a related note - anyone care to explain why the *economy* has to grow?"

            Economic growth doesn't just benefit the wealthy -- even regular people depend on the economy to grow over time. Say a young person in his 30s bought an $85,000 house in 1983, with a 30 year morgage. Early on, the house payments are really expensive. But over time, as a result of inflation, that $85,000 begins to seem less and less expensive because everything else, including his salary, has risen. Meanwhile, the house has increased in value as well. So the guy who was paying off a $85,000 loan for an $85,000 house in 1983 is paying off an $85,000 loan for a $135,000 house right now, which is a pretty good deal. In the end, modest inflation is a good thing for regular people. And inflation, generally speaking, is a product of economic growth.

            This is all grossly oversimplified, and I'm certainly no expert on the subject. But that's why everyone wants the economy to grow. The problem is when companies grow too fast....

            Steve
            • From my understanding (I am not an economist) inflation comes from the fact that there is more money circulating. be it because the goverment created new bills and didn't destroy old ones (usualy to pay internal debts). The more money on the street, the less it value. Inflation is usualy a bad sign for economy.
              • "From my understanding (I am not an economist) inflation comes from the fact that there is more money circulating."

                You're correct to a point but its much more complicated than that.

                Inflation is nothing more than rising prices across the economy. It can be caused by many things. Inflation is a necessary result of economic growth because when people have more money, they want to buy more stuff, but there is only so much stuff out there to buy. When demand outstrips supply, prices rise, and we have inflation. This can occur without tinkering with the money supply at all.

                Money supply affects inflation but isn't the sole cause. The Federal Reserve can control money supply by buying and selling bonds, and by controlling interest rates. This gives them a limited ability to control inflation, but the Fed can only do so much.

                It's actually even more complicated than what I have described. Macroeconomists still don't have a good system for describing and predicting the behavior of the economy as a whole, so no one really understands what's going on.

                By the way, the practice of printing more money without removing the old money from circulation is called "devaluation." This results in inflation but it isn't the same thing as inflation. Governments devalue their own currency for a variety of reasons, but they usually do it to allow debtors (usually the government itself) to pay off their debts more easily.

                Inflation is good for debtors and bad for lenders. The complicated thing is that the average person is both a lender and a debtor. When he applies for a mortgage to buy a house, he becomes a debtor. But when he puts money into savings he is, in effect, lending the money to the bank. When you invest money in the stock market and expect to earn it back, you can view that as lending your money to company (even though you really aren't). So the average person benefits and suffers from inflation simultaniously. However, the enormous expense of buying a home (which is still the norm in America) makes a mild inflation rate attractive to the average American.

                Steve
          • On a related note - anyone care to explain why the *economy* has to grow?

            Don't worry, we live on a finite planet, so it will stop growing one way or another. Let's assume the economy grows at a modest 3% rate for the next 1000 years. Let's see... we'd end up with 6.87e+12 times the economic output we have today. At that rate, we'd use up most any natural resource on this planet within milliseconds.

            Clearly, some limiting factor is going to stop the concept of exponential growth sooner or later. Probably sooner.

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Friday August 09, 2002 @08:39PM (#4043485)
      Why does every company have to become $100M+ in size. Why can't they grow the market that they serve now?

      Actually the answer is quite simple. Whether you think it is sensible or not is up to you.

      ActiveState are a Venture Capital financed company. This is the list of their investors:

      Greg Aasen, Kevin Huscroft, PMC-Sierra; Matt Dion, Crystal Decisions; Haig Farris, Fractal Capital Corp; Paul Lee, Don Matrick, Electronic Arts; Amos Michelson, CREO Products Inc; Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly & Associates; Hadar Pedhazur, Opticality Ventures; Michael Tiemann, Red Hat

      I don't know how much money was put into the company, but a good guess is the $10 million - $40m range; perhaps more. The basic math of VC funding is something like this:

      1 in 10 VC-financed companies make it. Therefore 9 in 10 fail. To break even a VC has to make 10 times their investment back. Therefore for a $25m investment the company has to be sold (through IPO or merger) for at least $250 million. To attract investor money that otherwise goes to the stock market or bonds or whereever you need to do better than break even. You need to have 2-3 times returns at least. So you need to be able to invest $25m and get back $500-$750 million at the "liquidity event".

      You want to sell a company for $500 million? You're going to need to be making profit and have revenues in the $100m/year range.

      Venture Capital is a high-risk high-reward deal, where the vast majority of investments fail. The handful that succeed have to succeed big in order to support any VC money at all.

      If a company wants to start small and grow slowly it should not take VC money; there are lots of other sources of financing, but they will be for much smaller amounts. Once you've taken VC money, don't start moaning when the investors want you to live up to the other end of the bargain. They give you $25 million, you give them back a company with huge revenues.

      • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by aero6dof ( 415422 )
        1 in 10 VC-financed companies make it. Therefore 9 in 10 fail. To break even a VC has to make 10 times their investment back. Therefore for a $25m investment the company has to be sold (through IPO or merger) for at least $250 million.

        Or the VCs need to learn improve their success rates. Maybe pushing along the company too fast causes 7 out of those 10 to fail, when they would have been perfectly fine taking more time. The investors providing VC funds with money have been pulling their funds back out. In the current climate, investors are going to be many times more critical about IPO buys - especially if the company seems like its propped up with low-integrity strategies. It would seem smarter to slow down your burn rate, wait for a better environment on Wall Street, and present solid financials for your IPO.
      • Even so, if VCs were smart, if they found that they had happened onto a company that was a slow-growth company accidentally, they would be better off keeping it that way rather than growing it unnaturally and dooming it to fail.

        Often, when faced with the choice of letting a profitable company remain profitable (but not quite as profitable as you want) and destroying the company completely, the VCs tend to choose destroying it completely, even when the outcome is obvious.
    • You are probably right about your predictions,
      but ActiveState has to try. Why? Because they
      have investors.

      When you take money from a VC, it's not free.
      They expect you to place your company on a
      high-risk/high-reward growth curve. They want
      a spectacular success or a quick crash and burn.

      This is what killed Ars Digita. I hope it
      doesn't kill ActiveState because I am tired of
      watching good companies crumble in their
      attempts to meet the demanding expectations
      of investors they never needed.

  • one word. (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by edrugtrader ( 442064 )
    w00t.

    congrats to all involved, and kudos to the CEO for realizing he was in over his head. nothing worse than a CEO that doesn't know how to be a CEO.
    • congrats to all involved, and kudos to the CEO for realizing he was in over his head. nothing worse than a CEO that doesn't know how to be a CEO.

      Sure there is. One who knows how to be a CEO according to today's business standards ... who will pilfer the once profitable company and exit the steaming ruins of the once profitable company pocketing millions.

      There are a lot of things worse than a well meaning CEO in over their head (they at least can learn), one who knows exactly what their doing and is looking out for themselves more than they are the company.

      And in today's marketplace, what percentage of the resumes/CVs crossing their desk do you think will be from competent, well meaning CEOs? 1%? 10%? I doubt much higher than that, and I'm an optimist.

      • Re:one word. (Score:2, Funny)

        by vsprintf ( 579676 )

        And in today's marketplace, what percentage of the resumes/CVs crossing their desk do you think will be from competent, well meaning CEOs?

        Hey, Carly Fiorna should be finished raid^H^H^H^Hhelping HP pretty soon. Maybe she'd be interested.

  • Larry Wall (perl) in their payroll (Score:3, Informative)

    by Khalid ( 31037 ) on Friday August 09, 2002 @07:45PM (#4043221) Homepage
    It's worth to say that Larry Wall (perl founder) and Guido van Rossun (python founder) are now in their payroll. So this is an important contribution to the open source community

  • They'll be bankrupt in five years (Score:3, Interesting)

    by McSpew ( 316871 ) on Friday August 09, 2002 @07:53PM (#4043265)

    Ten, tops.

    Any time a company decides it needs to get ten times bigger, it's taking a huge risk. It's certainly possible they'll grow to ten times their current size, but it's not particularly likely in today's economic climate. Investors got drunk on 15-20% returns during the heyday of the Internet bubble, but what we've seen in the last 18 months is that those returns were illusory. Growth (and returns) in the 5-10% range are far more sustainable.

    If they want to grow to ten times their current size, they'd better plan on taking at least 10 years to do it.

    • "today's economic climate" is quite different from what it was five years ago, which was different from five years before that, etc. They are predicting revenues this year of twice last year's revenues. They don't mention a timeframe for the 10x increase in business, so there's no reason to believe they may be overreaching. In addition, if the press release is to be believed, their products are used by "72% of the Fortune 500". Not bad. Sounds like they have a relatively mature product. In addition, they are getting management with more experience at this sort of thing. Add to that the fact that the next 8 to 14 months will be financed by the company. There is no sign or indication that the company will seek additional public financing at that time.

      If anything, these are the plans of a company who has learned well from the dot-boom companies.
      • I think that whole 72% of the fortune 500 is kind of a crock. Fortune 500 comapnies are so huge that it's possible that some small branch office someplace is using whatever the hell is your pet product.

        Of course 72% of the fortune 500 companies have downloaded activeperl or paid for it. That does not mean jack shit.
        • I think it's good that of the 72%, a goodly portion may only have it in a branch office or in a pilot program. YOu already have the product in the company, it's much easier to increase sales. One branch office works out well, so you put it in 10 branch offices. 10x increase.

    • At a 10% rate of growth it would take a quarter century to get to 10 times their size not 10 years; a 5% an entire working lifetime.

  • Is this an attempt to "Slashdot" this company's stock?

  • two words (Score:2, Troll)

    by r00tarded ( 553054 )
    Ars Digita

  • Translation (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Corporate idiots have taken over. Middle management will now move in and slow the company to a crawl.

    The average business day will now be meetings, layoffs, donuts, histrionics by incompetent managers, huge debt loads and massive spending on overpriced, irrelevant crap.

    All of the competent employees (the people who actually build things that other people want to buy) will be laid off, forced out, or outright fired, only to be replaced by compliant, agreeable, loyal know-it-alls, who will put their voice mail on "never reply", drench themselves in office politics, be paid higher salaries and will never be laid off.

    The HR department will triple in size and hiring will be reduced by 90%.

    Customers will be forgotten.

    Happens every time.
  • I think the key quote from the News.com article:

    "The initial expansion will be funded with current company resources, but next year ActiveState might seek a round of financing in the first or second quarter, Pike said."

    The investors that put big bucks into a company like that demand a healthy return on their investment. Otherwise, why take the risk?

    If a company founder is happy with a small company, the answer is simple: don't borrow money.

  • I was the CTO and "Holder of the plan" of a company that managed to develop a technology valuable enough to have been bought by a larger company. Or, if you prefer, to be bought by a company in the craze to buy companies. Any way you look at it we were bought. And, frankly, I am glad of it. But here is the thing. Once bought the new 'management' went about changing just about everything. How we did things. What we wrote. Whoe was on-time and who was late. Who was "leader" and who were the dregs. Typical big-business bullsh*t. Hey. I am not complaining. They paid me well. But I quit. In three months. Why? Does BONEHEAD ring any bells?

  • Why I stepped aside ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dick Hardt ( 599890 ) on Friday August 09, 2002 @09:38PM (#4043670)
    Thought I would post to clarify why I stepped aside. ActiveState is doing very well right now and we are about to grow out our management team and capitalize on our new product line PerlMx, an anti-spam, anti-virus and corporate communication policy server side solution. I have never run a large management team and in discussions with my board, we decided ActiveState was more likely to be successful having me be part of the management team rather than leading it, allowing me to focus on growing product capabilities. ... and if anyone thinks they have an original joke on my name, I'd like to hear it
    • OMG. "Corporate communication policy server side solution"? If you really are Mr. Hardt, please say you don't mean the sort of system I read about in Communications of the ACM a couple of years ago taht tries to enforce "chain of command" for emails (e.g. a clerk can't email the CEO without going through his front line supervisor, who passes it to the department head, who passes it to the Deputy Assistant Vice President for Keeping the CEO uninformed, ad nauseam). Please. PLEASE.
      • Let me start with a disclaimer...

        Having spent some small amount of time with him at the last PDC (in Ellay) and Lord O'Reilly's P2P in San Fran, i respect Mr. Hardt and really, really like AS' products (having Big Pimped them out to a large # of my consulting clients, who have both ordered and used them).

        If you have never had any experience with scripting on Windows (you Lucky Dog), and you have had such experience on *NIX, than you will find AS' scripting solutions a GODSEND, and an absolute vital add-on to VSE....

        It's fashionable to assume that any time a CEO/Founder steps down that the vulture capitialists have pressured them to do so for some B-School suit that can't tell a computer from a kumquat, but who give good meeting...

        Dick (and his Krewe) have done fine job on bringing both effective scripting and a very productive development environment to the Windows environment.

        AS (along with others like Don Box) have been instrumental in making MS take the independent developer community seriously. AS has particularly been our community's advocate in bringing adult scripting to the platform. If it weren't for people like Dick and companies like Active State, we might all still be using DOS batch commands and the WSH.

        Maybe (GASP!) Dick is telling the truth. And AS has a chance (in this rather difficult growth environment) to make some BigNoyz and accompanying BigBuks for all the people that have worked so hard to make useful scripting a reality on a OS that was NEVER designed to be efficiently scripted.

        Maybe for once, we could all skip the requisite /. cynicism and wish them all GOOD LUCK!

        (besides Lori is a serious Marketing Goddess!)

      • 1. Yes, this is really me.

        2. Call me Dick.

        3. Corporate Communication Policy enforcement are often tasks such as scanning outbound email for profanity or intellectual property leaks. The scenario you talk about is what Exchange and Notes do :)

    • Dick walks out of a bar in great pain and says "Apparently he wasn't asking what my name was, he was asking if I wanted anything."

      BTW Good luck with the stepping aside thing. I hope you know the people who you are handing the reigns over to well and that they are of high integrity and have good leadership skills. I have rarely seen the reigns handed to people who weren't unscrupulous, power hungry, and/or unqualified.

      -Eric
    • Micheal Dell never run a large management team before in his life, and so I can name hundreds of others that successfully did so creating > $100M companies. All managers that run a large management team had to do it a first time.

      loz
      • ... and if anyone thinks they have an original joke on my name, I'd like to hear it

      Ever thought of defusing this problem by going by Richard?

      As it stands, you've really got it sticking out there for everybody to notice.

    • Holy shit, at least your parents had a sense of humor!

    • ...and if anyone thinks they have an original joke on my name, I'd like to hear it.
      Well, if W goes through with his invasion of Iraq, he's going to need a military governor. If you took the job, then Iraq would be a Hardt place!
  • I've been using Active State Perl since almost the beginning. If just read the early versions of the Perl docs there was no question the authors of Perl and Perl modules were hostile to Windows and really didn't give a damn if Perl would ever run well on Windows systems or not. Active State brought out their first Perl and while it followed Perl syntax lots and lots of stuff didn't work because all sorts of assumptions existed in modules and code about the underlying system being a Unix box.

    With each new release Perl on Windows became more functional. Today you can write most Perl apps the way you would write them on a Unix box and they'll run fine under Windows. Further modules have been written by Active State which create genuine functionality for the Windows / Perl developer. Active State did a hard project well with what looks like a pretty small team. They've also created some pretty good value added commercial products.

    I wish them luck on the path of rapid growth. They've proven themselves on the path of rapid improvement.

  • Compare with Metrowerks acquisition (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday August 10, 2002 @01:26AM (#4044345) Homepage
    $100 million is a stretch for a programming tools company. Metrowerks was acquired by Motorola for US$95 million in 1999. Metrowerks had good technology, a lock on the Mac development tools market, a key position in embedded systems development, and was the sole source for development systems for some major game machines. ActiveState has a bunch of second-tier open source development tools.

  • I'll tell you what happened - from the inside (Score:4, Funny)

    by puppetluva ( 46903 ) on Saturday August 10, 2002 @01:30AM (#4044358)
    I was at the final "let's get rid of Dick Hardt" board meeting fiasco. What a mess. . . here's what happened.

    Everything starts out ok. . . typical boring board minutes stuff, somebody announces that we have a special guest and then who walks in? Fritz Hollings, Michael Eisner, Kenneth Lay and the DVD Consortium, trying to jack the whole proceedings! Well, Van Rossum and Wall completely freak out. Wall is like "get out of here you /^(f[uc|rea]k)ing m.*dia.*$/$1 you/" and Rossum starts shouting about how no-one respects his space and how it was time for something completely different, blah, blah, blah. ESR starts mumbling to Guido about how Ovitz is finally going to get whacked, and then it really gets weird. . .

    The whole room goes silent, the lights dim, this evil-looking powerpoint starts playing and this menacing voice starts calling for the elimination of Dick Hart. . . When I saw who it was, I couldn't believe it. I always kinda figured Microsoft's investment might sink the company, but I never knew who was behind all of this - most of the other ActiveStaters never would've guessed it either...A cloaked figure emerged from the break-room shadows and revealed himself to be. . .

    Cowboy Neal.

    (did you guess right?)
  • unless you count, "The company is looking to become a $100 million company, and they're looking for someone ... that [sic.] has that experience."

    Candidates include:

    • J. Clifford Baxter from Enron (ooops, he's dead, anyone from that company with experience will do).
    • CEO Bernie Ebbers from WorldCom (still alive)
    • Bill Simon [graydavis.com], currently running for California Governor.

    Experience people, experience! We want to be either a 100 million dollar company, or at least a company that looks like one.

  • Ten years ago, I worked for a company in which John Sidgmore was brought on board. The company was soon for sale.

    $100 million company isn't scratch - you don't suppose ActiveState may be thinking about making room for a puppet dictator, or perhaps selling the company outright to a certain Redmond-based software interest?

    Guess I should have seen that coming when they jacked the prices on their Perl Development Kit (still worth it), divorced it from O'Reilly, and began taking a very MSDN approach to their Perl packaging.

  • Someone thinks they smell money here. But I have serious doubts
    that they will become a $1x10^8 company. I've
    never paid them any money. Have you?
    What is their business model? This is either politics,
    (i.e. someone wants Hardt out of there way) or it's greed rearing
    its ugly head or both.

    We will see activestate wither on the vine and
    fall off unless someone that realizes what activestate's
    about comes on board.
    They make a perl for windows (and some other stuff).
    And few people pay for perl for windows.

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