Work History - Library Vendors, 1993-1998 - SilverPlatter

Wow, this was much more like it!  SilverPlatter was where things really took off for me.  This was an eclectic company that was organized around doing things right for the library/information user community rather than actually making money, which eventually led to its downfall of course but held appeal for a lot of us.  I made some great friends there too.

This was a very non-hierarchical organization.  I was hired at $36K as a Product Designer in their new Product Design and Usability group.  As with GEAC, they were very happy that I was an actual librarian.  This was an entirely differently laid out office than Inforonics or GEAC.  We had the whole second floor of a building on River Ridge Road in Norwood MA, and it was basically 4 or 5 *huge* rooms with some smaller conference rooms off of a main corridor.  It was all about collaboration and sharing what we were working on.  I didn't have an office, I just had a desk.  Everyone had a small desk there rather than an office, even top executives.

The dress code was back to "office casual," neat pants (clean blue jeans tolerated) and collared shirts.  And the commute was the most onerous I've ever had, though actually not that bad.  If there was no traffic I could make it there or back in 35-40 minutes, but there was never no traffic because the commute was mostly on route 128 around Boston.  I'd drop Dave at day care (later elementary school) and then get on 128 in morning rush hour, get in the left lane, and crawl around to the route 1 exit, then South past "auto mile" to River Ridge Road.  Commute time was pretty predictable in the morning, but varied wildly at the end of the day.  Several times it took me two hours to get home when it was snowing.  But mostly it wasn't bad and it was well worth it, this was a great job.

SilverPlatter was founded by Béla Hatvany and you might want to read this article about his life and vision.  Basically, he felt: "A healthy company ... serves five constituencies: first and foremost, the people who work in it; secondly, the customer, who deserves excellent products and services; thirdly, the investor; fourthly, business partners like suppliers and distributors; and finally, society as a whole."  He regularly took new employees out to lunch to try to share his vision.  I have to say that when he took me (age 37) and three young guys out, he and I talked through most of the lunch and the young guys just tried to follow the conversation.  What an eye opener!  He told us that he started SilverPlatter as an example of what a company could/should be.  It didn't hurt that the company was in the right place at the right time to exploit a market niche; when we had serious competition in that niche we began to lose our advantage, but the vision still remains.  What a great feeling it was to be on a team dedicated to helping each other and society as a whole!

So what was my role there, what did I do?  When I think back on it I'm abashed by how little I did in four years, but they really liked what I was able to contribute, gave me great raises, and I'm proud to say my co-workers came to depend on me.  I started out as a product designer and part of the usability group, but this was when I really came into my own as a project leader and a "Rosetta Stone."

What we did was contract with traditional library content suppliers like ERIC, MEDLINE, and PsycLit ... who accumulated huge scholarly indexes ... and we published them on CD rather than in expensive sets of books.  Libraries were dying to buy these because of the drastic reduction in price and savings in shelf space, but how could they make them available to their users?  Of course, when the company started this was long before SAAS and for most libraries, long before they could migrate to computer systems for public service.  So we sold CD readers and user interfaces to them for what would now be considered stone age Apple and Microsoft workstations.  I did some work on the Microsoft interface and soon on our new web interface.

But what I really did was translate stuff between marketing and programming.  I had the background to understand what needed to be done to serve library customers, and also had the chops to talk to programmers and understand the challenges they were facing.  That theme re-occurred in all my subsequent jobs.  I don't want to say that marketers are clueless or that programmers are misogynist cavemen (some programmers I worked with were female or trans), but it's sometimes very hard for them to work on teams when they can't understand the language each other is speaking ... hence Rosetta Stone.  I wrote specification documents and kept on picking new stuff up, like HTML and Javascript.

SilverPlatter was co-headquartered in London UK and Norwood, pretty different cities.  No one function was done in just one place, so there was a lot of back and forth.  I traveled over to the UK twice on business, which meant I could spend the weekend with my sister's family in London afterwards, which was a great benefit.  A few of the staff there were pretty self-entitled; the London developers staged an open revolt against a manager and at times refused to work with some women in the company.  My second trip over there was basically to step into a dysfunctional situation.  Maybe that's part of the baggage of employees being a prime "constituency."

In my four years at SilverPlatter my salary took off.  I'd never made very much money and started there at what was a pretty good salary by my terms.  Then I got better than 15% raises in my first two years, got a promotion, and by the end in 1998 was making $64K, which was pretty astronomical to me at that time.  Sarah and I had the resources to split a plot of land in Sedgwick, Maine with my other sister in 1997.

My role there changed when the company started shrinking and our business plan had to change.  We began to move to doing professional services for clients.  I was leading a team to deliver a website for the Modern Language Association, that would integrate some of our legacy databases but would mainly provide member services.  I traveled back and forth to New York several times for that, including unhooking their web server at 3AM and driving it down to NYC so it could be hooked up down there by the time business started that day.  I stayed in the Washington Square Hotel in Greenwich Village for that trip, quite a thing for a folk music fan.

During this period we ran through several executives with many ideas in a desperate attempt to find some that worked, it was a company of ideas.  But one executive told us that there were too many ideas, that we needed to improve our focus.  Soon after this I was at a sales meeting where one young marketer from the London office presented an excellent slide show rife with ideas, with graphics explaining how we could spread our brand in different directions.  She apparently hadn’t gotten the memo.  Another marketer raised his hand when she was done and asked gently how this fit in with our new concentration on focus.  Her life passed in front of her eyes and then she said something truly brilliant:  “Well, this is an opportunity for diversity of focus!”  I loved it.

But then things changed even more.  As mentioned, competitors had moved into our niche, and the company needed to change to stay alive.  The company had to do something, and I again totally missed the fact that it might impact me.  One morning in April 1998 they crammed 40 of us into a room in our suddenly too-big office at River Ridge Road (rats had been leaving the sinking ship at quite a pace) and cut off all our heads at once.  Some of the people in the room saw it coming, but most of us did not.  We thought we were vital!  Yeah, we were, but the company couldn't afford to pay us any longer.  They had made the decision to move all development to the London office (it was actually cheaper at that time), and they would continue with just sales/marketing in Norwood.

But SilverPlatter was great to us employees even then.  They told us in late April that they would lay all of us off at the end of July, and they would give us generous severance pay: one month at full salary for every year we'd been with the company (they rounded me up to 4, why not?).  And they added yet another goodie.  They needed most of us to finish the latest software release we were all working on, and the deal was that if that release was completed on schedule in July, then they would give us each two months more.  I got laid off (in a good market for getting re-hired) and got six months of full salary!

I wasn't working on the release but wrapped things up with the MLA, and then didn't have much else to do except to go out for long lunches with my friends, look for a new job, and experience the sadness of seeing what had been a great company get dissolved.