I think one month we had a 90% uptime. Our services crash all the time.
Our new boss has said he has around a 500-600 million budget for buying interesting companies.
We track it on PWS, meaning we're upgrading the whole platform live every week or two. So I'm surprised it's unstable for you.
But, correct me if I'm wrong,...isn't predix and cloudfoundry all hosted on top of AWS instances at the moment?
All of our URLs were AWS urls. It was funny.
We were hosting on top of our competition.
I'd be surprised if anyone outside Silicon Valley in GE's LOBs wanted to consider AWS for production considering how many have likely invested greatly into their own datacenters as well as the general trends of non-technology companies to fear an external cloud first instinctively regardless of how poorly managed their internal IT is. This puts GE in a poor position potentially in that even if they create a great platform that their customers that are perhaps even more technology phobic will need to invest money as well into areas they historically have failed to generate much ROI from. But perhaps GE's dominance / position can help them here and these concerns are long addressed.
PWS is on AWS. But Cloud Foundry itself can be mounted on AWS, OpenStack, Azure, GPC is coming and others I've forgotten.
BUT it might have been how our app was coded we weren't taking advantage of some sort of built in failure hooks or something.
CF is a pile of shit anyway. Its overly bloated and its hard to support and deal with
The problem I see with an acquisition growth approach IMO is that I would only expect GE to retain maybe 20% of the engineers after 3 years due to the lack of adequate supporting infrastructure and cultural foundation to help long term engagement. None of the talks I watched from management at GE Digital sounded focused at all either - the vision is all over the place and sounded like children wishing for ponies and candy without explaining how to get there and what to prioritize. That lack of management focus is what start-up folks recognize as a recipe for failure regardless of funding level.
1) Sales/Execs push product. Predix is so beyond fucked its not funny. I don't think anyone can come in and fix all the tech debt. Sales will push new customers and force engineers to meet their deadlines. Execs won't allow engineers time to fix anything. Its just keep pushing out awful hacks and 70% working products.
2) Anything you say your manager might listen but it nothing will happen. In order to get anything done you have 10 meetings about it during the week.
The San Ramon office is like a h1b1 warehouse. I think they know they have these people almost locked in and take advantage of it. I've been here over a year and have yet to see a single person fired.
You could honestly fire 40% of the people in GE Digital and it'll function the same if not better then it did before
This is GE's business model. When they want to enter a space, they throw money ($B) at it until they have a business. They tend to prefer organic builout, but they will buy companies or partner if they think they can't win organically. If you're willing to do that, you almost always get some traction, just because you have unimaginable resources and are willing to adjust your tactics if the initial gambit fails. They tend to do a lot of advertising for key businesses - this is why you see GE Aviation billboards in airports, and GE Oil & Gas ads in Houston.
The model has worked pretty well in the past - a good example is GE's entry into commercial jet engines in the early 70s. A good example where it failed was GE's computer business in the 60s.
I can't prove it (just a feeling), but I think Predix doesn't really have what it takes yet. We've spent a lot of time studying it, and it doesn't seem to offer real value to customers yet. That doesn't mean it won't get there eventually.
However, if Predix doesn't do well, we expect them to go on an acquisition spree to buy a few of the winners. Bently Nevada is a good example of that play - GE controls something like 70% of the machinery protection market. They didn't build it, they just went and bought Bently.
GE is clearly signaling that they badly want to be in this market, and I think it's pretty likely they'll eventually get there.