John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing battle

Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by raffraffraff on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @02:44AM (#37829176)

Silver Lake (along with Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith) bought Qualtrics after a dizzying sequence of planned IPO, acquisition by SAP, and then IPO. They're busily evicerating it, having just announced their second big round of layoffs, and apparently there gonna be even more job losses next March. Everyone I know there is planning their escape. What's hilarious is that this round of layoffs has impacted their ability to deliver on a major internal project because a key player was canned, so the project is now in hold (again).

I wonder how many of these $$$ people are looking at Musk and saying, 'hold on, we could do that too'. It's amazing how resilient a company can be to code rot and infrastructure stagnation. It takes a long time to kill a company, once it has a customer base and decent revenue streams. You could probably fire everybody outside strictly operational teams and simply coast along on the momentum for a few years, creaming off gigantic profits. And what the hell, jack up your prices too, right?

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Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by kasey_junk on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @08:38AM (#37831273)

Musks takeover of Twitter is not a particularly compelling example of this model. In a year he’s cut revenue by 40% (with every month trending worse than the last), not made it cash flow positive even with massive cuts, and is burdened it with tons of debt while making it worth much less. Twitter may turn around but right now I can’t imagine corporate raiders are looking at it as a positive example.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitters-c....

https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ad-revenue-musks-x-dec...

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Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by michaelt on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @09:16AM (#37831658)

Well, Musk did several things in close succession.

Sure, he scared off advertisers by welcoming nazis onto the platform. That's not something you'd want to replicate.

But he also fired 80% of the workforce, and the product kept working. If you have some subscription software where users keep paying $$$$ whether you add new features or not - getting rid of 80% of those expensive developers could be pretty tempting.

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Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by kasey_junk on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @09:24AM (#37831758)

This is an extremely common private equity playbook, that hasn’t seen as wide adoption in software as it has in other industries because there is a presumption that software clients aren’t particularly sticky and the software space allows faster innovation. Twitter is a story that confirms that bias (so far).

I think Unity is the next big test case. If users leave the platform in droves and revenue tanks it will continue to confirm the current hypotheses. That said private equity firms will keep trying it no matter what as the market biases make it an easier space to compete so I’m not sure it matters much to software companies.

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Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by michaelt on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @10:26AM (#37832541)

Eh, software can be pretty sticky if your users have lots of files in your proprietary format nobody else can read.

A company that uses Photoshop, or Altium, or SolidWorks, isn't going to move off it easily. Hell, existing users will often initially be thankful when product managers stop moving the buttons every 6 months.

Of course you'll stop attracting new customers as your product gets surpassed - but there could be a lot of $$$$ to be extracted before revenue drops to zero.

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Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by yndoendo on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @11:21AM (#37833219)

I would argue that much of Microsoft is built around legacy applications and code that prevents moving to alternative solutions. A lot of companies do not want to spend the time and money to pivot, not have the labor to do so. The true tech debt is a hidden cost where change is a visible cost.

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Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by red-iron-pine on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @02:09PM (#37835429)

Oracle and MSSQL enterprise owned my last org.

SAP offered to migrate us -- on to their new HANA platform. Guess how much that would cost?

So we still have these ancient Oracle boxes and newish MSSQL kicking around. They should be entering high school before too long...

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Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by Master_Odin on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @09:38AM (#37831943)

Private equity firms are already an absolute blight even before Musk's handling of Twitter. I've seen plenty of companies get purchased, completely gutted and then they try to extract maximum value from customers as quickly as possible before all customers abandon ship as the product(s) fall apart. They truly are scum.

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Re:John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing... by raffraffraff on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @02:31AM (#37841587)

Oh I agree. I just think that Musk upped the ante by not being a private equity firm and still outdoing them:

1. Fire most of the company

2. Introduce new charges (blue tick worked, but the API cost was just stupidly high)

3. Then start tearing into the platform, breaking shit

The 3rd bit is what's weird. Private equity don't usually want to destroy the product that they just bought. Perhaps he thought that Twitter needed to be simplified in order to be manageable with a skeleton crew, but it still doesn't explain a bunch of user-friendly changes or the lame "X" rebranding.

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