Re:Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com...
by dsr_ on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @07:24AM
(#21322384)
One more note for your first lesson: you might have a hot product that you sell at a product, but your own salespeople can kill you.
Lucent (AT&T spun them off to commercialize things from Bell Labs) had the absolute best product of the late 90s/early 2000: the Ascend MAX DSLAM/modem bank. Before that, an ISP needed T1 phone lines (24 channels) plugged into a CSU plugged into 24 modems plugged into a chassis that would emit serial that would be plugged into a router, along with a server that would do authentication and logging for billing and IP assignment. The Ascend MAX turned all of that into one box: phone connections to ethernet and all services provided and remotely administrated. Insanely great.
The problem was that Lucent's salespeople were very good, and the market for new ISPs was huge -- everybody was starting one or expanding their available markets -- so Lucent started offering financing.
When you finance your house or car, your loan is backed by the asset: the house or car still has some large percentage of the loan value at any given time, even with depreciation.
When you finance your ISP equipment purchase, Lucent assumed that they could always repo the MAX and sell it at a discount to some other growing ISP.
Lucent (AT&T spun them off to commercialize things from Bell Labs) had the absolute best product of the late 90s/early 2000: the Ascend MAX DSLAM/modem bank. Before that, an ISP needed T1 phone lines (24 channels) plugged into a CSU plugged into 24 modems plugged into a chassis that would emit serial that would be plugged into a router, along with a server that would do authentication and logging for billing and IP assignment. The Ascend MAX turned all of that into one box: phone connections to ethernet and all services provided and remotely administrated. Insanely great.
The problem was that Lucent's salespeople were very good, and the market for new ISPs was huge -- everybody was starting one or expanding their available markets -- so Lucent started offering financing.
When you finance your house or car, your loan is backed by the asset: the house or car still has some large percentage of the loan value at any given time, even with depreciation.
When you finance your ISP equipment purchase, Lucent assumed that they could always repo the MAX and sell it at a discount to some other growing ISP.
They didn't count on the ISP market collapsing.