[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
At 4:09 PM -0500 8/13/03, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>As for companies that move ahead without managing their
>risks, the fast moving Internet world is still writing
>off the costs of their losses. Excuse me, the losses
>of their investors are being written off. Many of their
>managers retired on the money they took from them.
Some of them, yes, Napster comes to mind. It's a fact of life that
businesses fail, especially in a free-wheeling, fast-moving area like
the Internet where the laws are way behind the times.
However, there are also many businesses that have succeeded despite
going in directions any typical lawyer would try to prevent. eBay,
Paypal, and Google are three examples (now two since eBay bought
Paypal.) None of these could have gotten off the ground if they had
been conservative about not getting sued. Napster would not have
succeeded as a business if it had listened to the lawyers from the
beginning. It would never have been started. Laws and lawyers will
kill some companies with new ideas, but they won't kill all of them.
And the companies that do succeed are far more likely to be the ones
that manage their lawyers than the ones that let their lawyers manage
them.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
|
