When Tandy computers
When Tandy's computer business was having trouble showing a profit in the mid to late 1990s, cost reduction assumed a much more important role in its planning, and Samsung offered Tandy what it it called a "strategic partnership".
After some time, this strategic partnership turned into a takeover, one of whose first overt symptoms was the replacement of 6 foot cubicle partitions with much shorter ones, the objective being to have each manager identify who was sitting at his or her computer at precisely 8 AM
It was when I learned that – as one of the engineering team – I was no longer allowed to make changes necessary to meet regulatory and performance requirements, and that only Korean engineers had that authority; it was then that I decided to leave AST, and as the full impact of the Korean management philosophy descended on the others it appears they all decided "the handwriting on the wall" was in Korean. An article on the AST bankruptcy once described what happened then as a "mass exodus of talent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AST_Research
My next job was at a telecommunications manufacturer specializing in the digital loop to subscriber equipment. It was a very good job, one with a good deal of responsibility, and I enjoyed it – and when that firm was acquired by a French multinational, those conditions did not change.
Those were the times, my friend…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecom_Valley
Biting the hand that feeds IT
