The company has lost its way, stifling innovation through its policies of overtaxing employees to the point there is no time for creative testing or creating innovative product features unless you are willing to give up any chance of work-life balance.
Over the past several years the influx of former Cisco VPs and upper management has changed the culture to fear-based management and their policy of requiring that some percentage of each business unit's personnel be given a bad focal review rating even when performing well has turned the culture from one of cooperation between peers to one of competition between peers. This has led to backbiting and unrest, loss of productivity and decline of the once-great culture. Correlation is not the same as causation but it is interesting to compare Cisco vs NetApp 5-year stock charts as Cisco shed these knuckleheads and NetApp brought them on board.
Raises and bonuses have been pathetic across the board for several years and the much of the best talent remaining after so many good, high-performing people were laid off has left due to feeling under-appreciated after the latest performance review cycle.
The company killed of 7-mode ONTAP to push C-Mode, when many of the top engineers felt that there was nothing C-Mode accomplished that could not have been accomplished in 7-Mode. Why? Apparently because C-Mode requires updated hardware, and somebody thought that forcing customers into forklift upgrades would boost the bottom line. Too bad they overlooked the fact that when faced with a forklift upgrade customers will look at what other options they can forklift in, and there are other products out there with better innovation roadmaps.
