[Asterisk-Dev] Re: Asterisk Book Reviewer

[asterisk at packtpub.com]

Your response reveals another two misleading and misinforming aspects of
Bruce's articles that I did not address because they would not occur to me
because of what I already knew.

First, Packt and PI are not companies of equal or even remotely comparable
size. PI had hundreds of employees; Packt has only a few, not "a lot of
the old staff," and it is not an "identical company," as you understood
from Bruce's articles. Packt is very small. PI in comparison was a massive
company. When Bruce's articles were published, Packt was even smaller. The
money that runs this small business has not come from PI. The money that
runs this business could have done absolutely nothing to solve PI's
problems.

Second, Packt is not being run by "the same management team." PI had tens
of managers, and Bruce was one of them, thought I do not recall whether he
was still a manager when the company went out of business. Packt has none
of those tens of managers other than Dave Maclean and myself. Dave was the
Managing Director of PI, and I was a Managing Editor at Wrox. In the
hierarchy of PI, this means that I had a small editorial team. I did not
manage managers. The worst that I could do to add to PI's woes was to
influence my team to publish books that did not sell well. I am sure I
also contributed to the failure of PI, but that was in my limited
capacity. The implication of Bruce's articles that Packt is being run by
"the same management team" of PI is just untrue.

As you say, you are an outsider, so I understand why you do not know any
of this. However, Bruce and anyone who knew Packt and PI knows these two
simple facts. Articles that can generate this kind of misunderstanding can
only be described as misleading, which is what I am trying to say. The
demise of PI and the staring of Packt were not an exercise of "shut down
the company and then start a new one with the same management, staff," as
Bruce's articles have suggested to you.

Let me repeat again that I have absolutely no intention whatsoever of
justifying or defending mistakes. These were made and many people lost,
and I accept these facts. I am just trying to separate facts from untrue
and unfair allegations.

I am not asking you to trust me rather than trust what you read in a blog
article. I am saying check the facts. Everything that I have said here and
in my previous message and may say in any future message can be checked
with anyone who knows about PI and Packt, and there are many of them.

Thank you.


Louay


> asterisk at packtpub.com wrote:
>> The other misleading aspect of Bruce Lawson's articles is the attempt to
>> treat Packt and David Maclean as one and the same. David Maclean is the
>> MD
>> of Packt, but he is not Packt. Packt consists of people who used to work
>> for Wrox, so they are people who lost their jobs, salaries, bonuses, and
>> other benefits like the rest of the staff of PI. In fact, the losses of
>> each one at Packt was probably a lot more than what each of most authors
>> lost.
>>
> Perhaps that explains why the company was reportedly $3M in debt.
>
> Reading this thread as an outsider, I see it like this:
>
> If a VoIP company suddenly went bankrupt with a massive debt then
> it's possible that some/all of the customers could lose their prepaid
> balance.  If, a couple of months later, the same management team
> started up an identical company, with a lot of the old staff, they
> should not be surprised at the hostile response they'll receive if
> they contact their old customers to pitch for their business.
>
> This all seems to be a case of "trust us - we know you lost money, but
> you probably won't this time - honest."
>
> I could be wrong, but this seems to me as if the old company went
> bankrupt simply to avoid having to pay off the massive debt it had
> managed to run up;  It probably expected to be able to simply shut down
> the company and then start a new one with the same management, staff,
> authors and a clean slate.  If someone advised the management team that
> that trick would be easy to pull off then they were sadly misinformed.
>
> --
>    _/   _/  _/_/_/_/  _/    _/  _/_/_/  _/    _/
>   _/_/_/   _/_/      _/    _/    _/    _/_/  _/   K e v i n   W a l s h
>  _/ _/    _/          _/ _/     _/    _/  _/_/    kevin at cursor.biz
> _/   _/  _/_/_/_/      _/    _/_/_/  _/    _/
>
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