I remember 1992, when several high-flying Silicon Valley companies' CEOs - Tandem Computers, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems - brought Bill Clinton in to speak in various companies' functions. Not familiar company names?
Tandem missed customers' desire for non-proprietary OSs, got bought by Compaq, which was bought by HP. Tandem was already in its death spiral when it brought in WJC ... maybe its manglement should have been minding their company's business instead of politics.
A little later in the 1990s, makers of Unix-based specialized workstations had their lunch eaten as the performance of WIntel machines improved to the point that they could do what customers needed, more easily, at a quarter of the price. Silicon Graphics was an early casualty (though going out of business entirely took a while); Sun Microsystems kept going long enough to attempt to switch from desktop workstations to computer room servers to ride the 90s Internet boom, which soon went Dot-Bomb. Eventually, Sun got bought by Oracle Corporation.
I'm not saying WJC caused these companies' demise, only that they should have known and responded to their customers' needs and wants better - they should have paid attention to their business instead of dabbling in national politics.
Nearly 25 years later, the CEOs cited in the article may well be making the same stupid mistake. Having been an employee at Tandem until 1993, having watched Silicon Graphics' fall while working at Sun Micro, having been a casualty of Sun's unsuccessful attempt to switch to servers, and having been laid of from another company, courtesy of the 2000-2002 bursting of the tech bubble, these CEOs, in 2016, owe their employees and customers better than getting sucked into national politics!
