The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on November 21, 2003

It's been a crazy week.

On Saturday (couldn't talk about it until the deal was announced), they told me that Atlantek (where I work) was about to be acquired by Zebra technologies. On Monday, it was. So, I now work for Zebra.

They're a successful large cap (something like $3 bn) company, and they own one of our two major competitors. We're going to take over the high end/low volume printer business (which is something we do well in) and they will continue with the low end/high volume business (which is something that we don't do as well in). Good strategic partnership and all that.

Of course, what the company says about itself and what other people say about it are two different things. Liz's brother has had experience with their barcode printers, and basically the quality is marginal and the driver sucks. It sucks so hard that another compnay reverse engineered Zebra's comms protocols to bypass the drivers and talk to them directly. So, they're not all that popular amongst the engineering crowd – they're just a big name so they get used.

Now, the other thing is I'm not sure what all I can talk about – Atlantek was a small company and they were pretty loose. This Zebra is hard; harsh locked down NDA's and rough contracts that make you sign away all your rights, noncompetes, the whole deal. I suppose that's all I can say, because they'll probably fire me for violating NDA if I say too much. I wonder if they realize that this is detrimental to the whole idea of free-spirited creativity?

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get the first cut of the beta out, and all these meetings and all that are going on delaying stuff. We still made it, I would have just like to test it more. But, it's a beta, so people expect things not to work 100%. Of course, I think it's more stable than a lot of betas I've used.

I need to play video games.

Category: LJ Import
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