Interlude - Index of

132 | Grown-Up Company
The Love Program completely changed our product road
map. We designed systems that worked in pairs—if one failed
the other could take over. We wrote software that replicated
all data to a remote location—no data loss even if a data center
burned down. And lots more technical details I won’t get into.
We had to cancel or delay many other projects, but Yahoo and
Cisco represented so much opportunity that it was worth it.
Investing in the Love Program was a major turning point
for the company. Yahoo and Cisco are both still big customers
today. If we had not taken their pain seriously, we would have
remained a low-end company, and I believe that our growth
would have stalled. In essence, we were betting that tech and
Internet companies could fuel our growth, and we were right.
By the time we reached a billion dollars, 70 percent of our revenue
came from those two categories.
••
In betting on Yahoo, we were betting on the Internet. Earlier
I said that the Internet was a giant wave that we spotted and
chose to ride. The wave eventually crashed, but the ride carried
us far. Our improvements in reliability and data protection
set the foundation for going after enterprise customers
more broadly.
The term enterprise refers to large businesses solving large
problems. When people talk about enterprise-class equipment,
they mean equipment reliable enough to handle your most
mission-critical applications: stuff that would really damage
your business if it failed. Many engineering groups don’t qualify
as enterprise. For a large group, failure could mean that
hundreds of engineers sit idle. It’s a big waste of time and—if