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Company size: Big is back
- pmorici 17y ago"Netscape and Enron promised to revolutionize their industries only to crash and burn" Hard to believe they compare those two in the same sentence. Netscape made a great contribution to the early days of the consumer internet where as Enron was a complete scam through and through.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- kiba 17y agoApache killed netscape, not microsoft. Netscape's bread and butter is webserver, not a web browser. Or so I heard.
- access_denied 17y agoAre you stupid? Making money was not important in Web1.0 economics. That's why they called it the "new economy". Why I am even writing this?
- tsally 17y agoWhy I am even writing this? Good question.
- access_denied 17y agoIt was meant as a joke. Well, I sunk my ship I guess.
- pmorici 17y agoWhat's your point?
- kiba 17y agoI was pointing out one possible reason why Netscape crashed and burned.
- dantheman 17y agoDon't forget Enron was a different company before the 90s too; it's only when they started lying, manipulating the market and committing outright fraud that they became a scam.
- mahmud 17y agoYou have no idea how big Enron was; there was a time in Doha Qatar we couldn't even book a hotel room in any decent joint without having to be Enron employees or affiliates. Imagine booking the hotel rooms of an entire country. Fucking oath, it doesn't get any more gangsta than that :-P
- pyre 17y agoThe irony is that the same execs in Enron that were committing outright fraud,lying,stealing,cheating... probably would have look down on 'gangsters' as 'scum'.
- mahmud 17y agothe pecking order of criminals is such that, everyone looks down on the crimes of those beneath them in revenue. the top dogs don't even break any laws; they dictate constitutions to permit their crimes.
- pyre 17y agoMaybe I should have been more clear. I think that the Enron execs probably thought that what they were doing was legal or gray area but not illegal. The irony is them looking down on gangsters as 'criminals' while viewing their own criminal actions -- which were not much different, only at a higher level -- as acceptable.
- lkrubner 17y agoI am concerned by the public's changing mood, in regards to entrepreneurs. In the 1970s the American government began the process of deregulation, which allowed some important innovations in the industries that were deregulated. Transportation was probably the first big industry effected, followed by many others. My impression was that there was a stretch when some combination of the public mood and the government's emphasis conspired to encourage small startups. The 1980s and 1990s were clearly good in this respect. The mood of the last decade has been increasingly punitive. An increasingly harsh attitude toward flexibility in the law has been evident elsewhere for some time, but in the last 10 years that attitude has increasingly been expressed in the field of business. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is the most evident expression of the new trend - what once would have been treated as a civil matter is now treated as a criminal matter. At some point during the next 30 years I expect breakthroughs in biology to allow for a new wave of startups, if the government and the public allow those startups to exist. In matters relating to health, it is worrisome to consider what a punitive legal attitude means - a medical treatment that fails to perform leads to jailtime, rather than a lawsuit. I think it is urgent that everyone who cares about entreprenurial culture in America to make the argument, to their friends and to strangers, that innovation in business depends in part on tolerance, and that, in practical terms, this means most matters of conflict should be treated as civil rather than criminal cases. Once upon a time, before the mid 1800s, most Western countries treated bankruptcy as a criminal matter, rather than a civil one. The liberalization of bankruptcy law was one of the factors that allowed our modern economies to gain the dynamic nature they now enjoy. I would guess that most of us know someone who has tried to do a startup, failed on their first attempt, and then later met with greater success on successive tries. Tolerance of failure is the first pre-requisite of a dynamic economy. Since the public seems at risk of forgetting this fact, we all need to make that case, to whoever is willing to listen.
- jakarta 17y agoWhen you cross the line into experimenting with medical treatments, you're not gambling with other people's money, you're gambling with lives. You can't just equate it to any other kind of start up, it has to be held to a higher standard.