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The Internet Businesses Programming IT Technology

New Golden Age for Outside-the-Box Startups? 144

Posted by Zonk from the web-bubble-2.0 dept.
jg21 writes "A brief essay on the SOA Web Services Journal claims there is a new phenomenon among startups, the 'momentary enterprise'. The article defines the term as a business that 'takes advantage of an opportunity that may only exist for months'. The piece claims that we're entering a golden age of technologies that can be glued together to create new types of information that fill an identifiable need. On example given is VOware like Groove, which is likened to IM on steroids. From the article: 'The ingredients for another wave of new companies are all around us - pervasively all around us. They include new wireless extensions of the wired network and the further exportation of technologies such as XML.' Intriguingly optimistic."
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New Golden Age for Outside-the-Box Startups? More

New Golden Age for Outside-the-Box Startups?

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  • Didnt we have this already? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by daxomatic ( 772926 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:35AM (#13888443) Journal
    Everything your team needs for sharing documents blah blah Its called exchange?
    • I'm sure you meant CVS...

    • I wish (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @12:47PM (#13889884) Homepage Journal
      Things like Exchange are great /within/ a company. Well, except for the server admin. They suck bigtime outside a company and between companies.

      That's a large part of what these sorts of people are on about - working better within _and_ between companies - though I really don't know if they have anything interesting beyond hot air to offer. Anything that gives the customers at work a moron-proof interface to send us documents that DOESN'T involve email gets my vote.
      • FTP. Works great. Integrates with the OS.

        Unfortunately it isn't secure...

        The moment Windows fixes its filesystem API so that you don't have to be a master of Windows kernel internals - only of your filesystem - is the moment that this will be easy.

        And Exchange will die horribly like it should have five years ago.
        • Well, thanks to proftpd I don't have to worry much about the server security issue for FTP. I don't like the fact that it's in the clear and that few clients support digest authentication, SSL wrappers, or STARTLS, but since this would be a semi-public service it'd be OK in this one case.

          The problem is that experience has shown me that FTP is, in fact, not idiot proof. Even with shell integration in WinXP and Mac OS X, and a document with lots of detailed screenshots, clients just *can't* *do* *it* and will
  • From TFA:
    "The productiveness of a conference call definitely suffers because multitasking participants are only __slightly__ paying attention."

    Wow - who did they ask this question?
    Isn't participation in conf calls a bit like presence on the corporate IM system?
    Online and therefore must be working?

    • Re:Conference calls (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @10:04AM (#13888603) Homepage
      Problem stems from the fact that 90% of all conference calls are useless wastes of time. If I did not join in from my desk and then mute the mic and then promptly ignore everything (I record to my iRiver though) I would not get anything done. On a specific project we have at LEAST 5 conference calls a week on the subject, typically going for 1 to 2 hours and talking about crap we covered the last 5 calls.

      conference calls are a waste of time now days because they are overused and nothing productive is done with them anymore.

      • Re:Conference calls (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pete6677 ( 681676 )
        It's a people problem. People like to feel and look important, and one big way to do that is to hold meetings. Many aspiring managers hold pointless meetings where they get to hear themselves talk for an hour for the sole purpose of justifying their existance. They will use whatever medium is available to them, be it an in person meeting, conference call, online meeting, whatever. Until this cultural problem is somehow solved, pointless meetings will be a regular way of life in most companies.
        • So we use IRC for meetings and the manager gets to feel important due to his high rankings in all channel stats (except for longest idler and similar stuff).
      • So, you're recording to the iRiver for the 10% of conferences that are a useful waste of time? ;)

        Seriously, like most meetings, calls are incredibly inefficient. There's a few rules to follow for efficient meetings- just because they're over the phone doesn't mean they don't apply anymore.

        That's why if there is no agenda, I'll just refuse to attend. Otherwise, good facilitation is everyone's responsibility. Some interventions can be useful:
        "What needs to be done about this item?"
        "I'm happy with both solutio

      • Re:Conference calls (Score:2, Interesting)

        by rosciol ( 925673 )
        The problem with conference calls and meetings is mainly that the people calling them typically don't understand how to hold a productive one (and therefore may call them unnecessarily, leading to overuse). There are an incredibly large number of ways to hold unproductive calls and meetings, but the window within which one can hold a productive call or meeting is very small.

        As a traveling consultant, I spend a lot of time on calls, and I can tell you that there are a lot of calls that just distract me and
    • Wow - who did they ask this question?

      They asked *you*! Weren't you paying attention?

  • Blah blah blah corporatespeak blah blah blah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cyburbia ( 695748 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:38AM (#13888466) Homepage
    "Such commodities will be expertly and automatically leveraged by super-deep, business-to-business automation, and new enterprises will start up by focusing their energy on differentiating their value in the marketplace rather than creating and supporting all of the associated accoutrements."

    Can we have a translation to English, please?

  • Grand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:38AM (#13888467) Homepage
    So we're going to have more people getting VC for ideas that won't last more than a few months.

    Well, I guess that's an improvement over the last bubble: Those guys didn't have a plan beyond getting the VC.

    • Re:Grand (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Moby Cock ( 771358 )
      Sure they had a plan.

      It was to have their company bought out by Yahoo and become instant billionaires.

      The plan this time seems to actually create a working company and then watch it go bust within a year.

    • Re:Grand (Score:2, Insightful)

      by flokati ( 926091 )
      I think the point is that gluing together different technologies is so cheap and easy, these companies don't need VC.
    • Right. Now the plan is to pop up, grab the cash, and disappear.

      I suppose that works if you're the one grabbing the cash. It would seem that the speed of Economic Darwiniam Evolution just increased.
  • And of course what allows all this magic to happen? Why SOA of course!

  • XML technology is so amazing (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:41AM (#13888486)
    It harnesses the power of an ASCII text stream!!!

    I predict this XML technology will soon take over the internets.
    • I predict this XML technology will soon take over the internets.

      It already has. Heard of the "HTML" virus?
    • Actually, it adds markup capabilities to a Unicode text stream [w3.org], something that previous markup/structured data representation technologies had troubles to do in a robust and standardized manner (even XML 1.0 itself has issues with that).
      • In the case of XML 1.0, any encoded text stream (usually Unicode, please oh god not ASCII) . I'm pleased to see that XML 1.1 tightens this up a little. They still leave a gaping hole for confusion between UCS-2 and UTF-16 (and beween UCS-4 and UTF-32) by defining "unicode encoding form" as "encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32" but "legacy encoding" as "any character encoding not based on Unicode." Still, it's better than "god knows what encoding this document is in, it's missing a <?xml directive and the

        • They still leave a gaping hole for confusion between UCS-2 and UTF-16 (and beween UCS-4 and UTF-32) by defining "unicode encoding form" as "encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32" but "legacy encoding" as "any character encoding not based on Unicode."

          I believe they are consistent here. UCS is a set of Unicode characters as abstract codes, and UTFs are representations of those characters with actual byte streams. There is no such thing, officially, as UCS-2 "encoding".

          I've already bought the nice heavy wooden

  • I love the department name (Score:5, Interesting)

    by K.B.Zod ( 642226 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:43AM (#13888503)
    It certainly could be the beginning of the next bubble. Joel Spolsky doesn't think much [joelonsoftware.com] of the "Web 2.0" hype, which I think this article may be buying into.

    The bit in the article about how XML will solve all our data interchange problems is particularly curious. C'mon, it's just text files with a bunch of angle brackets, when it gets right down to it.

    • Re:I love the department name (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @10:04AM (#13888607) Homepage
      The bit in the article about how XML will solve all our data interchange problems is particularly curious. C'mon, it's just text files with a bunch of angle brackets, when it gets right down to it.

      I'm currently working on some integration issues. XML/SOAP is a whole lot simpler than the way it used to be. Sure, you still have to map the fields and make sure the data are compatible, but having the interface well defined, the protocol well defined makes it a helluva lot easier to do "many-to-many" integration, whereas before everything was custom built to make one system fit another.
    • "C'mon, it's just text files with a bunch of angle brackets, when it gets right down to it."

      You could also say something similar about all the source code for Linux, or any other program. It's just text files. And programmers, they're just typists, really. I think you're kind of understating things a little.

      The beauty of XML is how useful it is in light of it's simplicity. Something doesn't always have to be complicated to be ingenious.
      • Indeed, see Tim Bray's comments on Why XML Doesn't Suck [tbray.org] for some great insight.

        Really, the problem many people have had with XML is that the tools aren't always up to par. But new ways of doing things come around to fix things, such as pull parsers [xml.com], which simplifies XML parsing without having to resort to regular expression tricks like Tim Bray was talking about in XML Is Too Hard For Programmers [tbray.org].

        Eric
        HTTP header viewer [ericgiguere.com]
      • No doubt XML is very useful. What I'm getting at is XML by itself doesn't do much for you. It's the semantics behind those documents — the schema, DTD, what have you — that can possibly make it useful for specific applications. And getting everyone to settle on those is the real work.

        The sense I get though, is that some think you can just sprinkle XML on your system and voila, data flies around seamlessly! XML can get you toward that goal, but you still have to decide what goes inside all thos

    • it's just text files with a bunch of angle brackets, when it gets right down to it.

      So the next big thing will be... Appleworks* for my Apple IIe?




      *which originally used bracketed functions for document formatting long before HTML or this wiz-bang XML you speak of.

    • The bit in the article about how XML will solve all our data interchange problems is particularly curious. C'mon, it's just text files with a bunch of angle brackets, when it gets right down to it.

      Hey! Those text files have feelings, you insensitive clod.

    • It certainly could be the beginning of the next bubble.

      Nah. This is the foam after the bubble popped.

  • erm, huh? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Bill Dog ( 726542 )
    Also, the fact that their life spans will be measured in months or a short number of years will not be grounds for dismissal from Harvard Business School. A successful business model doesn't need to be measured by its staying power.

    Who's going to purchase an IT solution from a business that admittedly is only going to be around for several more months?
  • Seriously, who'd buy software from a company (to avoid OSS zealots) that doesn't seem to have enough money to invest in a website?

    I mean, have a look at the website VOware [virtualoff...ftware.com] have, it looks like it's from the 80s
  • Statements such as

    "Advances in image-processing algorithms now enable computing networks to actually understand scenes."

    and

    "It is now trivial to litter an environment with video-capture devices because the costs and wiring complexity have been nearly eliminated."

    Suggest that the overall content may not be of very high value ;o|

  • Another wave of shorting stocks and I can retire. :-)

    Can I short these guys on the day of the IPO?

  • Not another "new" economy. (Score:5, Informative)

    by plasmacutter ( 901737 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:53AM (#13888554)
    there is a new phenomenon among startups, the 'momentary enterprise'. The article defines the term as a business that 'takes advantage of an opportunity that may only exist for months'.

    I'm a student of economics, and I can say with authority that this kind of market trend is not one we want to gravitate toward.

    Such short term viability of a firm or product detracts from economic stability and societal welfare.

    A firm which does this kind of work can't take advantage of economics of scale for it's market, meaning higher costs for producing a good or service which will not be demanded in the long term.
    Even if there are strong IP protections, such short term niches would not provide compensation for a large development effort.

    Would you want to be employed by a firm whose products were projected to be worthless by year's end?

    The article speaks of "reconfiguring, lego like" to pursue the next momentary opportunity, but that creates tremendous uncertainty and volitility.

    on that one I ask:
    -How would you behave with your money if you weren't sure the next "opportunity", or 2, or 3, or 4, that your small business pursued woud gain you a profit?
    (i know in such uncertainty i would spend less, and if the population collectively spends less then recession takes hold, making the uncertainty a self fulfilling prophecy).
    -How comfortable would you be investing your retirement or college fund in stocks or even bonds for a firm which behaved like this?
    (It's not the kind of sector in which you can expect a career/pay stable enough to raise a family, i'll tell you that one.)

    I think it would be an economic nightmare if this were to become predominant business practice, but I'm happy that most managers would never sanely consider such a strategy as their primary business plan (if i did, i'd be in constant fear of being fired by the directors during a time when my prediction as to what the "new momentary market" was).

    • I'm a student of economics, and I can say with authority that this kind of market trend is not one we want to gravitate toward.

      Your study of economics does not give you the right to speak for what "we" want.

      The market is not something that will avoid certain business scenarios so that you may avoid living in constant fear. This thing called "capitalism" does not have feelings, nor does it care what you feel. If you haven't felt that fear yet, you've been blissfully insulated from the market realities the va

    • Would you want to be employed by a firm whose products were projected to be worthless by year's end?

      I think we already have similar types of businesses, I call them "fad businesses". Currently the cell phone market is full of fad businesses -- small retail outlets which exist as franchises for the carriers. There are also smaller fad businesses which market 'phone holsters', changable faceplates, extra batteries and other novelties. They'll eventually die off and be replaced with whatever the next fad

    • Would you want to be employed by a firm whose products were projected to be worthless by year's end?

      Only if they pay 100K per year and give good references.
    • Would you want to be employed by a firm whose products were projected to be worthless by year's end?

      Depends on the money. If the pay is good (and the checks clear), I don't have a problem. Plus, it isn't such an alien idea. For example, I doubt many clothes or shoe styles last more than a few months. A clothing retailer is constantly introducing new designs and throwing away old ones. Now if everyone were to suddenly adopt a few month horizon, that would be silly. But again, that has happened with some o


    • I imagine the overhead of managing the "Lego-like reconfiguring" would be HUGE... in addition to the company just trying to get its REAL work done. Companies grew large to improve their efficiency. Ironically, people now see big companies as great examples of inefficiency. After some ups and down, the end result will be a little of both and somewhere in the middle.

    • Would you want to be employed by a firm whose products were projected to be worthless by year's end?

      Doesn't matter. We're approaching the singularity, and the closer we get the shorter the "idea/implementation/successor" cycle gets. So right now, companies can expect to profit from an idea for a year. A couple years from now, that cycle will only be 6 months, possibly less.

      Ray Kurzweil has a graph (not on this page, [kurzweilai.net] but similar graphs appear and I'm too lazy to find what I saw a year ago), show

    • I'm a student of economics, and I can say with authority
      I stopped reading right there. Taking Econ 101 does not make you any type of authority. Wake me up when you have 20 years' experience.

      BTW, IAAE.

    • I'm a student of economics, and I can say with authority...

      Actually... No, you can't.

  • But who do we sue? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:53AM (#13888557)
    Sound like this might creates some apoplectic lawyers. If a company lasts only a few months, it's going to be a difficult target for lawsuits. By the time the plaintiff finds a lawyer or the case goes to court, the company is gone.

    I suppose you can go after the principals, but if most of the money came from (and went to) a set of legally-insulated investors (e.g., in an LLC), then the managers of the company won't be the deep pockets that lawyers love. Can a dissolved entity be reconstituted (and money taken back from investors) if that company is later found liable for something?

    • A few months?

      Hell, a few days is likely, and it'll get worse (or better), as in this bit from Charles Stross's Accelerando [accelerando.org]:

      "Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin,

    • "Can a dissolved entity be reconstituted (and money taken back from investors) if that company is later found liable for something?"

      The whole point of LLC is to protect investors from the illegal actions (and consequences thereof) of the companies in which they invest.

      Let's take everyone's favorite whipping boy Enron for example. Imagine the outrage/chaos if every Enron investor became criminally/financially liable for the illegal actions of the company? If that were the case, NOBODY would want to invest,
      • The whole point of LLC is to protect investors from the illegal actions (and consequences thereof) of the companies in which they invest.

        This is true. The investors enjoy limited liability, but not zero liability. Investors can lose 100% the money they put into a venture (but nothing more than that). The question is: can legal proceedings on a dissolved LLC (or one that distributed significant amounts of capital back to the investors) force a recall of that invested/distributed money?

        IANAL, but I won

      • It's deuced odd, innit, that we do lots of things we're responsible for, even things we are responsible for through the actions of others ... and yet society MARCHES ONWARD.

        Owners want to expand their wealth. They can ONLY do this by investing. Hence they MUST invest.

        So it doesn't matter about sentiments like "ooooh, I don't like being held responsible!". (Of course, it DOES matter if you're an elite scumbag and think that laws and morality just don't fucking apply to you.)

        Humans have invested s
        • So let me get this straight.

          Let's say somebody sues (an easy target here) R.J. Reynolds and winds a judgement that far surpasses the company's assets. In your world (and correct me if I'm wrong) everyone who invested in the company, including other companies and fund brokerages, should be held financially responsible for the balance?

          Or another example. Random Company A goes bankrupt, and has millions of dollars in debt. You would go after the company's investors to cover that debt?

          Under such a system, wh

          • Under such a system, why the hell would ANYBODY want to subject themselves to that kind of risk??

            For the same reason that people convince themselves that gambling is a good idea: because the potential rewards outweigh the risks.

            Do you think gambling should be risk-free? After all, that's what investing is.

            Perhaps under such a system, investors would be more cautious with their money, and stupid fucking idiotic ideas like "we'll lose money on every transaction... but make it up in volume!" would n

          • In "my world"? WTF? If you OWN stock in the company, you OWN the company ITSELF. YOU are responsible for the things you OWN, and doubly so for things that ACT on your behalf. So it's not just in "my world", Bub.

            You want to OWN profits? That's what stockholders have always wanted. Well, you also have to accept responsibility for LOSSES.

            I've already explained that investors ARE investors since they want to grow their wealth. Since they MUST invest, they really have to accept the idea that they ar

  • Y'know... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:54AM (#13888559) Journal
    I'm not one of the people always yelling that stories here are paid ads: "Slashvertisement! Astroturfer! Roland Picqupiale!!!!"

    But I'm thinking Zonk got taken on this one. That VOware link is informative, why?

    • Yeah, that's exactly what I thought. Actually what I thought was "so how can I spin some appealing-sounding Slashdot story so they willingly link to my company's homepage?"

  • Hi! BIG BUSINESS DEAL NOW!!!111 (Score:3, Funny)

    by simp ( 25997 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @09:54AM (#13888560)
    Hi! I have a super duper business idea for you. But it will only last for a few months, so be quick! Please send all your VC money asap to my nigerian bank account manager so that he can leverage your business opportunity. Feel free to synergize your partners to maximize the cummulative profits streams to me.

    I await your business proposal, please send accurate paperwork so that we can leverage the moment and exchange funds in this great enterprise 2 enterprise opportunity.

    Vice-Prince Mike Okelewa, the 2nd.
  • Well, I don't think having companies that go boom and bust quickly is really such a great idea, especially after having worked for two of those...
  • Over the course of the last hundred years the speed of change in almost every aspect of our existence has increased dramatically. New technologies and new ways to use existing technology are coming faster than ever. The multitasking cellphone that the writer feels has "so many functions that one could get lost just trying to find them all" is only one example. Obviously this will allow business models to evolve that take advantage of these changes. This idea is not new however, these are simply new appl

  • Start your company now! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tumbarumba ( 74816 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @10:13AM (#13888663) Homepage
    Hey, here's the perfect page [andrewwooldridge.com] for this topic. It will generate the name of a Web 2.0 company and product description in seconds!
  • It seems to me this idea is a bit too much wishful thinking in the current patent litigation climate. Combine 3-5 technologies in a unique way for solving some problem that will be acute for a few months time, get hit with patent lawsuits from three different directions.

    Of course, maybe you can rake in the cash in solving that acute problem for a few months, close up shop and get out of Dodge before the lawsuits do much harm. Put the money overseas in a non-patent-litigious society's banks and kick back?
    • How about just addressing a niche in a country or region without dumb software patent rules? Part of the point is having the right environment.

      Many people have dumped from a great height on this, but in essence it probably right. Most businesses, even the 'long' lasting ones, are essentially only their immediate product. By not growing a huge hierarchy a business setup and limited around that one product is probably going to be best and more efficient than a typical business model. Nothing says you can't

  • This is crap (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dikeman ( 620856 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @10:34AM (#13888822) Homepage
    Starting up a bussiness is not and has never been restricted by the cost of setting up an infrastructure.
    What makes every company (and especially IT companies) expensive to start?
    EMPLOYEES
    It's hard to get good people and after you get them together you will spent by far the biggest part of your budget on their salaries.
    And my guess is that this will always be the case. People want a salary, no matter how many nifty 'Hybrid PDA's' you throw at them.

    Every VC will laugh his ass of if he reads this article. It's a load of bull that makes my stomach turn.
    • What makes every company (and especially IT companies) expensive to start?
      EMPLOYEES

      Then why don't those companies hire people right out of college and maybe get some employee loyaltee while saving some money instead of hiring the latest guru who who costs 50% of the companies budget and will end up leaving for Google in 5 months.

      I think the biggest problem with many companies is their aversion to hiring people right out of college.

  • New Old Things (Score:3, Informative)

    by scoove ( 71173 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @10:42AM (#13888861)
    new phenomenon among startups, the 'momentary enterprise'.

    Actually, Tom Peters dealt with the concept extensively in his 1993 book, Liberation Management. [amazon.com] While it's certainly pre-momentary business technology in some respects, it does a good job addressing the higher-level conceptual issues associated with this business construct. One example referred to was Peter's video publication business that existed for about a month and included experts from numerous fields who came together to create a business exclusively for the production of the video, and then disbanded and went onto other projects.

    *scoove*
    You know you're getting old when the new things aren't.
  • I thought this was an article about booting from a network device. Woe is me.
  • Sounds a bit like kitbashing, only with software ideas instead of model kits.

    Fortunately for wannabe startups, R.A. Lafferty already covered the details in 'Slow Tuesday Night', where a typical entrepreneur can go from rags to riches 3, 4 times in one evening. Instant (POD) publishing, channels for quick creation and distribution, even rapid divorces, a lot of the stuff we use today.

    Of course, that was in 1966.

  • time to market stretches out...the more groundbreaking your idea, the more time it takes to convince a group to fund you [a single investor going it alone in a big bet on your business idea is rare...VC's like company when they take the plunge].
    I know. I was employee # 6 at a 1996 start up that met its first VC over a year earlier...and lost out in the end to Vermeer [which got bought and became Front Page" because we were on hold for a very precious year. You have any idea of the difference between ge

  • Life Imitates Art? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rprime ( 671195 )
    Funny how this article came out while Cory Doctorow is serializing a novel [salon.com] about small temporary businesses that just glue together the resources available. I think some of the text in the article was lifted directly from the first chapter.

  • Ooooo.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @11:20AM (#13889137) Journal

    I'm so anxious to work for a compnay that has to get all its cash from revenue right away, then folds in 4 months. Will the next "visionary" please step forward? No, the stick is perfectly harmless. Step closer, it's OK...

  • Grove network is not in anyway an example of the business models that the article proposes. Its actually Ozzie's addition to microsoft [com.com].

  • Real Journal Article (Score:3, Informative)

    by BarryNorton ( 778694 ) on Thursday October 27, 2005 @11:31AM (#13889216)
    White papers and flashy websites (when they're working - Data Mobility Group) are all very well, but if you want to read a real journal article on the subject, Andrew McAfee (an Associate Professor at Harvard) recently had one such in the MIT Sloan Management Review : 'Will Web Services Really Change Collaboration' [mit.edu] (though like a real journal article, it's not free and doesn't have Flash adverts and videos in the middle).
    • Thanks, Barry! That's a fantastic article. It really discusses the relevant points, and makes a strong case. I'd suggest that everyone read it. It does discuss matters from an excellent perspective.

  • 'When it has been fully exploited, the momentary enterprise is reconfigured - Lego-like - to pursue another opportunity. A "pop-up" business model is born, thereby changing the competitive balance and leveraging pervasive data.'

    I've heard of this sort of business before. I believe the colloquial term is 'fly-by-night'.

  • You Young Kids (Score:5, Funny)

    by serutan ( 259622 ) <snoopdoug@geekaz ... minus physicist> on Thursday October 27, 2005 @01:23PM (#13890240) Homepage
    Nowadays just about everything is "on steroids."
    In my day all we had was "Turbo."
    My parents had to settle for "o-matic".

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