What comes around..
Picsel had great technology, great engineers, and the most incompetent, stupid, arrogant management I have ever come across. Guess which of the above was the weak link...
- from an ex-picsel employee
Picsel Technologies goes dark
The future of Picsel Technologies is in doubt today after its website disappeared amidst claims that it has gone into administration. Sources claimed last night that PricewaterhouseCoopers had been appointed as administrators of the Renfrew-based firm. Meanwhile, the website appears to have vanished off the internet. When we …
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A Real Shame
they had some excellent and very relevant technology.
Needless proliferation
"The patents owned by Picsel, and that case, will be among the assets that the administrators will be valuing with a view to sale."
Uh, thanks for the legacy, Picsel. Buying into the propaganda and feeling the need to be all "butch" about your "intellectual property", you've managed as a final act to dump your toxic assets where they will be a hazard for some time to come. Once again, the lawyers will get to impose their taxes via extortionists like Intellectual Vultures, asserting spurious claims of "invention" that should never have been allowed to stand in the first place.
Root cause: lack of beer
<-- INSERT MORE BEER TO CONTINUE.
Having a top heavy management and operations staff drawn from too small a cultural and gene pool might be fine when you've got 40 employees drenched in money shots from the venture capital hose, but not when you've got 400 people who have to live off just what they actually earn, much like the Pilgrims must have done.
It's really all been over since they missed the IPO in 2007 and the market tanked? IIRC, wasn't it Price Waterhouse Cooper that handled that, and said they weren't ready to sell? I guess financial services is where the smart people work - they get paid, win, lose or EPIC FAIL.
Idiots
Perfectly good product, probably the best competitor to the iPhone there is. And still they managed to fuck it up.
Apparently PwC have never seen so many outstanding salary payments, either. It's a testament to the patience and dedication of the engineers that they have put up with "delayed" salaries since bloody December last year. Good luck to all of them (and me!)
- another ex-picsel employee (with three months salary outstanding!)
Yeah, right.
Picsel's demise has nothing to do with the current economic climate, or late payment by customers, but instead is all about shoddy marketing, sales and product management that resulted in too small a revenue to support an ill-advised expansion, resulting ultimately in redundancies and a small company of 150 staff with an excessive amount of debt.
Will the last person to leave Silicon Glen please switch off the lights...
I went for an interview with this bunch some years ago. The main thing I remember was being interviewed in a room full of old Acorn kit - including two of the semi-mythical Phoebe machines! Slightly odd, considering they were developing for mobiles and handheld devices... Ironically, at the time I was trying to escape another mickey-mouse outfit because they couldn't afford to run the payroll every month...
@A/C 21:21
The Acorn kit isn't that odd really. Most mobiles have ARM chips inside, and ARM is an offshoot of Acorn. The Archimedes being the first consumer machine based on the technology.
If those really were the Phoebe machines, you just saw both of them! Rumour has it they only made two prototypes!
Another classic British FAIL
V. clever tech + management types well up own a**e flogs good stuff to small number of huge customers then thinks they can pull off a bunch of badly thought out projects to gain huge expansion, followed by either receivership or bankruptcy.
This seems to be the script for most UK tech companies that got anywhere near successful in the last 30 odd years.
It seems the UK can still do good tech *or* good management. I suspect the latter is a *lot* rarer than the former. The 2 together seem *almost* an impossibility. Anyone care to name a UK company (not part of a US parent) that does (did?) both?
Perhaps in other countries actually getting a decent reward is at least as important as being very good, or management is actually viewed as quite difficult and treated as a serious business.
No cash, no flow
"In a statement they said Picsel had suffered cashflow problems .."
This is a bit like describing a region suffering a drought as having "rainflow problems"..
@Frank Bough Glad to hear you are stil alive. Hope you got over the cocaine and kinky sex addiction..
@Steve Evans
No, despite the similar CPU architecture, I don't think old Acorns would be that useful for developing embedded ARM software, to be honest. That would be a bit like using old SGI workstations to develop for MIPS-based embedded systems! Possibly better than nothing, but there are much easier ways of doing it.
Anyway nobody was working in this room at the time - it was almost like somebody's private Acorn museum...
Khand booted as CEO?
Can anyone confirm?
If so, where does that leave the cosy licensing relationship between Picsel Technologies Ltd and Picsel (Research) Ltd? Since "Research" owns the patents, how much are they going to squeeze out of "Technologies'" new owners in order to continue licensing and using them?
How long before the "Picsel sues Picsel" story breaks?
@Khand booted as CEO
I can't confirm that one, but I did hear a rumour* that the CFO was suspended the day before the administration was announced. The word "scapegoat" springs to mind, as do the words "invisible employees who are also relatives" and "fleet of BMW's for the execs".
*rumours are the only way the management have communicated over the past eight months, so this is probably as close to "100% FACT" that you're likely to get, until the administrators report comes out.
@a/c
The Phoebe cases you saw were just that: cases, there was nothing inside them. Picsel was spawned from alternative publishing, a company that produced software for acorn computers, and at least one of the founders, and a few of the developers, were acorn groupies. That's why a section of the head office of the "worlds leading mobile solutions provider" was used as a shrine to a bunch of old acorn tat that should have been thrown in a skip years ago (and maybe now it will be).
Picsel had a lot going for it in the early days. A compelling product vision, a CEO who, despite his general loathsomeness, was adept at bringing in funding and customers, and a good development team. Unfortunately the founders, in their wisdom, decided to populate the upper and middle management, from VP level down to engineering management, with a bunch of cretins who would have found collecting the trolleys at the sainsbury's across the road a major career challenge. Almost all of the operations posts, plus several key management roles, were given to people who would never have succeeded at an interview, but who had the advantage of being relatives or friends of directors. The level of nepotism was astounding, and the only real suprise to many ex-employees will be that this farce continued to operate for such a long time.
I wonder what PwC will have to sell? As far as I know Picsel Research owns all of the IP, this sort of situation is exactly why it was set up in the first place. Most of the competent staff will have left ages ago; anyone's who's been hanging on still waiting to be paid after 6 months of broken promises either isn't the brightest bulb in the pack, couldn't find another job despite months of trying, or is clinically insane. Whatever the case their presence probably doesn't enchance the value of the company as a growing concern.
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