

Ten years later, insiders press a different view of Enron - rickdale
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/story/2011-12-03/enron-10-years-later/51592092/1

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spodek
The former Enron people in the article claim the company had great,
hardworking people in it and ready-to-implement software.

I see no inherent contradiction between a company having fraudulent, criminal
leadership and hardworking, well-meaning people in it. Nor in a company having
sellable products and a bankrupt business plan to implement it.

I doubt anyone has any problems acknowledging Enron had tens of thousands of
well-meaning, hardworking employees, ignorant of the disaster its decision-
makers were fomenting. Everyone knew the company had salt-of-the-earth
employees among the criminals -- they were the ones who lost their
retirements.

The article didn't change my opinion of Enron.

~~~
tptacek
It's USA Today. I think this is a story that began its life as a hook ("let's
find someone to stick up for the worst corporation ever") and backfilled it
with whatever crap they could find.

I didn't flag it because personally I find it interesting that the worst
corporation ever also tried to start a CDN that many people in the industry
found credible at the time. But it's a terrible news story nonetheless.

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tptacek
I had a funded streaming media startup from '99-'01. We built overlay
multicast software --- the kind of middleware code that Enron is accused not
to have had to back up their CDN.

What I can add to this thread is, Enron very much was talked about in '00 as a
real CDN player. Not just in our own internal meetings, but in bizdev
discussion with other large media and CDN companies.

That doesn't mean Enron-the-company wasn't a giant fraud (EBS was a tiny
portion of Enron as a whole), but I plausible the idea that some senior guy at
EBS could truly believe Enron was a legitimate enterprise.

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barrkel
_One demonstration from 1999 narrated by Yeager appears to show an early
concept of cloud computing, in which a user could access online applications
or "apps" through an Enron network_

A user accessing applications via a network is an innovation in 1999? Try 30
years earlier with Telnet, and probably many other examples.

 _And yet another presentation from 2000 includes a demonstration of an on-
demand movie service similar to those available on most cable TV systems
today_

The Wikipedia article on VoD cites existing _commercial_ services already
having launched in 1998.

I don't doubt that there were a lot of smart people at Enron; but whether they
were ultimately producing value is in doubt. These examples don't seem to
provide much evidence.

~~~
tptacek
I guess I take your point, but "cloud computing" today is very much not the
same thing as "cloud computing" in '00. To build a streaming testbed network
in '00, we had to buy _physical colocations_ in data centers around the world,
and we were a tiny company.

Everything has precedent in something else, but that doesn't make everything a
CICS mainframe.

~~~
Retric
Sure, but the super computer crowd had long separated most of the physical
hardware and even data center that something runs on in 00. Compared to that
even EC2 is still a crappy service that forces you to micromanage things.
There are plenty of awesome services are built on top of EC2, but 'modern'
cloud computing infrastructure still sucks from both a cost and stability
standpoint.

~~~
tptacek
I'm just saying "cloud computing" connotes something more than just having
servers attached to networks.

~~~
Retric
I am referring to automated billing of arbitrary computing resources based on
usage from a large pool spanning several computer architectures and computing
locations. Now it's not LINUX boxes, but that's because they focused more on
latency and bandwidth than 'modern' cloud system providers do.

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dbfclark
For me, the key problem here is that these are very peripheral insiders
indeed. Here's my company's study of the Enron corpus:

<http://blog.lumino.so/2011/11/07/enron-evil-versus-football/>

Just look at all that orange at the top of the first image: that's traders
talking to each other about trades. Energy trading is what the company was
about, not the tiny internet company that they may have spawned or the HR
department. Those people don't deserve to have had their reputations ruined by
the fraudulent hedge fund blowup and C-suite malfeasance, but that doesn't
mean their parochial views are the correct overall view.

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andrewfelix
_"...a small but increasingly vocal group of ex-Enron employees"_ This
_'group'_ consists of two people who's reputation is tied to Enron's demise.

Most of the people reading this article will have seen the thoroughly
researched 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'. I don't think anyone who's
seen that documentary is going to be swayed by a couple of consultants crying
foul.

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brown9-2
What a shock that those with a reputation to protect or untarnish would wish
to push an alternate narrative.

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stfu
Very interesting story. Even so many of the tales might be misrepresented it
is still fascinating how winners and looser try to construct different
narratives of the same "facts".

~~~
tptacek
This narrative is probably orthogonal to the corruption narrative.

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shareme
you know the only bad thing about Enron?

A top accounting firm got destroyed for nothing..

