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What The Bubble Got Right
dtolton writes "Paul Graham has written an article entitled What the Bubble Got Right. In recent years the roaring tech bubble has become a byword, yet Paul does an excellent job of articulating what it got right."
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What the heck class of jargon is "bubble"?
September 2004
(This essay is adapted from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)
I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999. One day, when the stock was trading around $200, I sat down and calculated what I thought the price should be. The answer I got was $12. I went to the next cubicle and told my friend Trevor. "Twelve!" he said. He tried to sound indignant, but he didn't quite manage it. He knew as well as I did that our valuation was crazy.
Yahoo was a special case. It was not just our price to earnings ratio that was bogus. Half our earnings were too. Not in the Enron way, of course. The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a pyramid scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter-- stimulating another round of investments in startups.
As in a pyramid scheme, what seemed to be the returns of this system were simply the latest round of investments in it. What made it not a pyramid scheme was that it was unintentional. At least, I think it was. The venture capital business is pretty incestuous, and there were presumably people in a position, if not to create this situation, to realize what was happening and to milk it.
A year later the game was up. Starting in January 2000, Yahoo's stock price began to crash, ultimately losing 95% of its value.
Notice, though, that even with all the fat trimmed off its market cap, Yahoo was still worth a lot. Even at the morning-after valuations of March and April 2001, the people at Yahoo had managed to create a company worth about $8 billion in just six years.
The fact is, despite all the nonsense we heard during the Bubble about the "new economy," there was a core of truth. You need that to get a really big bubble: you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. (Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.)
Now the pendulum has swung the other way. Now anything that became fashionable during the Bubble is ipso facto unfashionable. But that's a mistake-- an even bigger mistake than believing what everyone was saying in 1999. Over the long term, what the Bubble got right will be more important than what it got wrong.
1. Retail VC
After the excesses of the Bubble, it's now considered dubious to take companies public before they have earnings. But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that idea. Taking a company public at an early stage is simply retail VC: instead of going to venture capital firms for the last round of funding, you go to the public markets.
By the end of the Bubble, companies going public with no earnings were being derided as "concept stocks," as if it were inherently stupid to invest in them. But investing in concepts isn't stupid; it's what VCs do, and the best of them are far from stupid.
The stock of a company that doesn't yet have earnings is worth something. It may take a while for the market to learn how to value such companies, just as it had to learn to value common stocks in the early 20th century. But markets are good at solving that kind of problem. I wouldn't be surprised if the market ultimately did a better job than VCs do now.
Going public early will not be the right plan for every company. And it can of course be disruptive-- by distracting the management, or by making the early employees suddenly rich. But just as the market will learn how to value startups, startups will learn how to minimize the damage of going public.
2. The Internet
This
But seriously - 20 something billionaire yuppies sans business plan?
Before the bubble burst, college kids would be getting 80+ grand/year. Right before I graduated **BOOM**.... good luck finding a job now...
"I think the Internet will have great effects, and that what we've seen so far is nothing compared to what's coming."
That's been my view all along, both during the boom and during the bust. We ain't seen nothing yet. When you create a means of communication such that almost anyone on the planet can interact with anyone else on the planet, great things will develop from it. We saw only the baby steps during the boom, and the bulk of what will develop is yet to come. But it is coming. People love to jump off fads and disavow them. That's especially tempting if you lost money in the process. But the idea of person-to-person direct communciation, and everyone-is-an-author concept, is no fad. People love to communicate, they love to express themselves, and the streamlining that the Net makes possible has, is, and will continue to make breakthroughs in the business world.
Just give it time and we'll see wonders yet unimagined.
His point about the rising power of nerds highlights something of great importance: the "old class relations" that sparked Marxism are essentially dead. In many respects now there is a symbiotic relationship between the large number of white collar workers and the "capitalist class" which allows for an almost give-take relationship.
Now I know that some will look to outsourcing and say, see class exploitation still exists! Yes, but it is the fault of the people of many of those countries. If your government is corrupt and you have a democratic system of government, why are your people systematically voting for political parties that keep your country from growing. America's corruption is bad, but it doesn't hinder growth anywhere near that of many developing or stagnate countries.
People often want it both ways. They don't want to adapt to a new economy, but they want all of the benefits. You have three choices, and these have existed for most of human history. You can lead, you can follow or you can be dominated. America leads, India follows, others are simply dominated because they refuse to follow the leaders' example and try to grow, and cannot lead on their own, thus another country steps in and economically dominates them. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's a fact of life.
The law of unintended consequences will one day come back to haunt corporate America if it doesn't realize en masse that domestic research and development and manufacturing are the safest route. The rule of law in America can be safeguarded, but Americans cannot do so around the world. The lesson of the "rise of the nerd" is that yes, you can start outsourcing jobs eventually to "regain power over the nerds" but what happens when those you outsource to abscond with your R&D results and your domestic nerd base is so atrophied that they can't compete?
The lesson of the modern economy is that businesses need to realize that no part of the company is less valuable than another. Whereas in the past, the rich could safely exploit their employees, they now do it at the risk of their own base of wealth and power.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
"What made it not a pyramid scheme was that it was unintentional. At least, I think it was."
I just don't believe that. I remember people talking about how this was bogus at the time -- AOL got slammed for similar practices. If I knew it was a pyramid scheme, I find it hard to believe that the incredibly sophisticated finance types working for Yahoo! didn't.
I used to live in Chicago. When I first moved there, I wondered why none of the aldermen seemed to be honest. The answer, I think, is that the system prevents honest people from moving up.
I have the same impression of wall street. I don't think that honest managers can run public companies in a way that's competitive. A guy like warren buffet is an obvious counter example, but he's unusual and he dates back to a different era.
By the time these crazy bubble scams came around, we were living in a different world with different expectations. Share prices had to rise quickly and constantly, and the only people who could pull that off were scamsters.
I don't think the geek community has ever really come to terms with what happened on the financial side during the bubble, how crooked the people who ran it really were, or how much damage it did to the economy. The google IPO was surrounded by nostalgia for the bubble -- if only the old days would come back!
Almost all of what this guy says strikes me as questionable at best.
The big question here is how you can possibly build customer loyalty if you outsource the business unit which is in charge of customer relationships. This doesn't sound like a wise idea to me.
Under construction: swpat politics overview article
What I was telling people back during the bubble turned out to be true. I basically said "If you think everybody is going to be shopping on the Internet, then don't invest in specific web sites; you'll never predict which ones are going to be profitable a few years from now. Instead, invest in the delivery companies (e.g. FedEx and UPS). No matter where or what people buy online, the delivery companies are going to be more profitable!" I think this is still good advice. From the fact that DHL is now getting into domestic delivery, apparently they think so too.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Well there's ebay, amazon, google...
continued at:
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
Now I can jump up and down and DEMAND a development server and have plenty of examples to back up my need for one.
I'll now be the first person to raise my hand and ask the following question: "So, how will this make money?"
Whenever I hear New - anything - my instant reaction is BULLSHIT!
Those were great times; I wouldn't trade them for anything
I think the lessons learned are worth the pain.
JD
...26 year olds with good ideas will increasingly have an edge over 50 year olds with powerful connections.
now go get me some coffee, b@#ch!
and now back to the fallout shelter...
It's a good article but, yes, it is rather long. The author makes good points. After reading the article I am not sure how to comment on it without regurgitating what the author has already said. However, I do think that there were valuable lessons to be learned from the whole "bubble" phenomena and we did not necessarily learn those lessons.
http://www.busyweather.com/
having gone under with 4 start-ups between 93 and 2001, I think I have scars entitling me to say Mr Graham has hit a couple of nails on the head a couple of years too late. The ideas that were pesuasive to our VC's were NOT persuasive to the folks we thought were our customers. The net result of a venture is the PRODUCT of the value proposition of the business AS STAFFED AND EXECUTED and the depth of the business concept's grasp of the PERCIEVED NEED for the service or product.
Foolish disclosure: I made money on only one of those starups and that entirely by accident. I wish our VC's and senior management had the long term vision, so absent in those days, that is implied in Graham's article.
who put this sig here?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
OK...so he arrives in California around 1998 and determines that California is the next big thing for the next 50 years??? The next Chicago? Pleeeeeezee...
Where has this guy been?
California has been the next instant source of wealth since well before the gold rush! The bubble wasn't the first time silicon valley became the center of the universe - take a look at the first PC boom/bust of the 80's.
Sorry to be so provincial here, but being a California native I have a bone to pick about the characterization of California. Sure, we are all totally super nice out here and polite and all of that (um - yeah right) - but keep in mind, most of the people from here ARE transplants.
I'm a native of the Bay Area and have lived here all my life - I can count the number of people on maybe one hand who I know can say the same. So the attitude has little to do California or Silicon Valley.
I took a detour to New York for a year and a half in the mid-nineties. While I found that most New Yorkers did have a rough crusty exterior, once you get passed that they are as warm as anyone from CA. Not only that - but friendships (like startup ventures), have a tendency to be somewhat transitory in California. I found the opposite on the other coast.
That said I wouldn't live anywhere else - but to each their own.
The internet, a global thing, is supposed to make it all better, except that I have to move to a single point in space - California - to make that global revolution happen?
That no matter how hard he tries to make himself (or perhaps others) feel better with the following statement:
You need that to get a really big bubble: you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. (Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.)
He's wrong. Really wrong. I, and others, were able to see through the hype and stupidity during the bubble, and see what companies had real value, which didn't, which were over-valued, and in some cases, which were under-valued. I don't know how much money he lost, but claiming that "even smart people are sucked in" isn't a valid excuse, and no amount of history on how physicists and poets don't necessarily good economists is going to change that.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Marketing is still much more important than substance. It's why VHS won out over Betamax. It's why Microsoft won out over Macintosh. It's why politicians worry more about their hair color than their platform. It's why we're outearned by those superficial beer-swilling fratboys in management.
Sorry, boys, we had our time, and it's come and gone.
Zero-to-Titties in 0.36 seconds. Thank god for fucking google.
:) )
(Results 1 - 10 of about 695,000 for titties. (0.36 seconds) - direct from google
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
And yet have you ever seen a Google ad?
/.. Sure it's nitpicking, and people would go to Google regardless of the ad, but it's not like they don't advertise at all.
I've seen plenty of ads for Google's "adsense" technology, especially here on
There was plenty of high value in the network revolution and still is. It's just that so many con men showed up, that when Greenspan put the screws down trying to make it a zero-sum game, the positive-sum players got eaten alive by the zero-sum players.
Seastead this.
I call bullshit. In 1999, my son was taking an enrichment course in our local school system. The particular unit was on finance -- so Iassigned this then ten-year-old boy to read _The madness of crowds_. He read it and said "Dad, is the current stock market another tulip craze?" Now, granted, he's a really smart kid -- but I suggest that if any ten-year-old can read a book about tulips and the south sea company and recognize that the internet bubble was more of the same, then lots and lots of grownups could, too.
Quit trying to follow the money, and be happy.
I have no patience with people who decided to become software engineers (or doctors or lawyers or golf ball polishers) because they thought/were told/read somewhere/had a divine revelation that "that's where the money is".
People who decide to go after work that they don't enjoy in order to make more money than they think they would at something that they enjoyed, are doomed to be miserable. They will be be miserable IN their job, they will be miserable AT their job, and they will make the people around them miserable, too.
Having a vendor certification/college degree/union card doesn't mean you will be happy at a job, and it doesn't mean you will be successful at one, either.
Find something you really enjoy doing, and then find someone willing to pay you to do it, and you will be happy.
And if you're happy, you won't need to bitch about how terrible the job market is, or how your "investment" in your certification/college degree/union card "is not paying off". A job is not something you can buy from a diploma store, or that you have a right to, having spent some requisite amount of money at one.
I've interviewed a lot of people for a lot of jobs, and I'll tell you right now: I don't hire or recommend hiring people if they don't enjoy doing what it is they are going to be doing on a daily basis as part of their job, and do it well. Other things matter too, but that's the A-number-one gating factor for me giving you a thumbs up.
For a software engineering job, if you weren't one of the people who hung out at the computer lab simply because you enjoyed being around the machines and other people who also enjoyed that, then I don't care that you received straight A's for the Visual C++ work you turned in from your home PC without ever interacting with another human being who was interested in the same type of thing, before you went to the frat party and drank yourself stupid.
Work -- and life -- is not something you skate by on, with the minimum acceptable level of effort, so you can do "something you actually like" after it's over.
You may or may not be a skater -- if you aren't, I'm sorry that you're so bad at selling yourself to prosective employers, or that you love doing something you aren't very good at; either figure out a way to address your shortcomings, or pick something *else* you like to do, and do that instead.
But if you are one of those people who picked their career based on a "top salaries" list, and then skated through college on the minimum possible effort to maintain a nice looking GPA, looking for the high paying job at the end of the rainbow, the world is probably better off if you are stuck asking those of us who didn't "Would you like fries with that?".
-- Terry
I'm not sure I follow this post well enough to say that I disagree. However I do want to point out that progressive critiques of market economies are often driven by more than just identifying class conflict. For example, the mobility of capital was a prediction of Marx and others that has largely come to pass. Its a source of valid concern and has very little to do with whether particular rich people are able to exploit particular poor people. When teams of professionals move vast sums of money around the globe there are real human consequences which accompany those moves. Sometimes the consequences may be reasonable; other times not. To the extent that the decision is based *only* on a private financial rationale, it does not necessarily follow that the results will be good for the public. At any rate, I think Marx might've looked through his time portal and thought nothing more than, Boy, I should've lightened up on the Hegel when I was analyzing class conflict.
I'm laughing at clouds.
Awesome ... I never thought of calling myself part of a "domestic nerd base". It's like I'm a bacterium, bringing health to colon of American business. Helping the bottom line, as it were.
The value of options to an employee vary according to the type of options and the ability of the employee to affect the price of the company's stock. Options to buy General Motors stock at today's price don't have any motivating value to the line worker who is unlikely to be able to raise the stock price of a company in long-term slow decline. No matter how hard he works or what brilliant suggestions he makes, by the time he can exercise his options the stock will be below the strike price and the options will be worthless.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I love the dig at Usenix :)
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
One upshot of which is that the companies of the future may be surprisingly small. I sometimes daydream about how big you could grow a company (in revenues) without ever having more than ten people. What would happen if you outsourced everything except product development? If you tried this experiment, I think you'd be surprised at how far you could get. As Fred Brooks pointed out, small groups are intrinsically more productive, because the internal friction in a group grows as the square of its size.
I know from experience (non-trivial engineering projects} that more people does not necessarily equal more success; sometimes it drags down an effort while the original goal gets lost in "management".
Wow, that was a pretty crappy comment. What is always needed is a leader who knows what he's doing, not a cheerleader who has a vague idea of what's going on, and this applies to software as well as making widgets.
I'll trade 1000 "money-making" employees (after IPO) for 10 people that are focused on the goal.
Options were part of my compensation when I first started my current job back in '99. We went IPO in Spring '00. About a dozen of the higher-ups became millionares at the opening bell. At the height, my options weren't worth anywhere near millions, but it was fair chunk o' change for a 1-year-out-of-college grunt. Unfortunately, I wasn't vested, so I couldn't excercise any of my options...
I just reached my 5-year anniversary, and my initial option grant is now fully vested. It is also fully worthless. After being delisted from NASDAQ, even if I could find someone OTC to buy, the share value is but a fraction of my excercise price. Now I do know people who worked for larger companies who have made, and continue to make, a decent return on their option grants. It is a great incentive to both keep the employee productive (his production has an impact on the stock price) and loyal (encourage him to stay with long vesting periods). But there are just as many of us "survivors" who took a lower salary with option grants who got burnt on the deal.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
What if your passion is creative writing? Get in line, there's room for 1 Stephen King on top and maybe 50 other people to make a living off that. (I'm talking money here...though for the record, I think the Dark Tower series kicks ASS.)
There's a distribution of jobs that society needs done. There's a distribution of jobs that people want to do. These distributions are not identical. If they were, half of society would be movie stars, a third would be CEOs, etc.
Certainly you'll be more successful if you do something you love, but not everyone has that option.
Like p0rn isn't still the biggest driver of the net nor the one least disrupted by the bubble?
/.'s regular featuring of Paul Graham's essays. There really isn't anybody better going around at the moment.
The moderators must be suffering a severe case of literalism.
And I for one celebrate
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
The thing about the bubble is that people thought of it as a short term thing.
Really what companies were trying to do was to centralize services on the internet, if they had suceeded and been able to keep those monopolies for any length of time their mindshare alone would have been worth the investment.
Many of the companies that accomplished this are increadibly successful (Amazon, Google, MSN, Yahoo etc.)
Unfortunatly they never reached a level of dominance where they could control the advertisers, which was where a lot of income was supposed to come from. Also they didn't understand the idea of the internet which is to sell to everyone with a tiny profit margin(and infintesimal overhead) therby reaping huge rewards, instead they went with the "Spend tonnes of money on marketing then overcharge the consumer" market strategie which is so prevelent today.
There will be another bubble when people begin to think long term. This long term thought bubble may last longer than the short term thought bubble. (I think that's a funny pun, kill me).
you wrote:
His point about the rising power of nerds highlights something of great importance: the "old class relations" that sparked Marxism are essentially dead.
No, they are not dead. Maybe you are just isolated from them. Or maybe you just see what you want to see....
SO many Slashdotters seem to think that everyone is making 80K a year. The facts show that is not the case at all.
year 2000 Average After-Tax Income by Quintile:
80th-100th percentile:$141,400
60-79th percentile: $59,200
40-59th percentile: $41,900
20-39th percentile: $29,000
0-19th percentile $13,700
You can see that the bottom 40 percent take home 29K, and that was at the HEIGHT of the longest boom in a long while. It has gone downhill since then for most people. No class warfare, huh? Well, there should be....
In many respects now there is a symbiotic relationship between the large number of white collar workers and the "capitalist class" which allows for an almost give-take relationship.
Ohh, man. The word is not "symbiotic", but "parasitic". The capitalist class parasitizes the rest of us. And they feed us baloney about how they are the innovators and creators, etc. yakety yakety yak.
What really galls me is that these scumbags take credit for the cumulative effect of scientific research adn engineering. They point to all the electronic consumer goods laying around and say it is all because of the free market that these things exist. Ah, no. Engineering and science improve incrementally because of stored knowledge that builds up over time and leads to improved products. Our improvements in goods are mainly due to that, and not predatory capitalism.
Now I know that some will look to outsourcing and say, see class exploitation still exists!
Oh, yeah, that "exploitation" stuff, it be a thing of the past, dontcha know....
Yes, but it is the fault of the people of many of those countries. If your government is corrupt and you have a democratic system of government, why are your people systematically voting for political parties that keep your country from growing. America's corruption is bad, but it doesn't hinder growth anywhere near that of many developing or stagnate countries.
Absolutely. It is always the fault of those lazy, scumsucking poor people. A few lashes will improve their morale.
Say, didn't I meet you in a prior life? Weren't you the foreman on a Roman slave galley? Or was it that cotton plantation in 1804?
People often want it both ways. They don't want to adapt to a new economy, but they want all of the benefits. You have three choices, and these have existed for most of human history.
The little scum. They can just suck it up....
You can lead, you can follow or you can be dominated. America leads, India follows, others are simply dominated because they refuse to follow the leaders' example and try to grow, and cannot lead on their own, thus another country steps in and economically dominates them. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's a fact of life.
Oh, pardon, i think i feel a vomit coming on....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
This is a less rosy and more realistic look at what's going on with salaries. During the bubble there may have been a rising powerbase of nerds but that's long gone and you can be sure the market will work hard to never have to pay those kinds of salaries again.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
What The Bubble Got Right: a long winded cry for a bygone era. It is the VC money that drove the internet boom, not any great innovation on the part of the young college graduates. The internet boom only changed the flow of VC money from the established business types who would normally receive it into the hands of technical graduates who normally would not see it. That trend is at an end and the capital is again flowing along the traditional paths. In fact the trend of CS majors getting rich has reversed as the market has become flooded with technically degreed college graduates who all hoped to get rich. The irony of it is that the jobs that would have been available are disappearing through the medium the author has assisted in popularizing, in that technically competent people can be outsourced cheaply through off shoring via the internet.
If there's one thing that I think no 26 year old will ever have it's the ability to navigate politics. Deciding what to build next is trivial in comparison to having the gumption to stick with it to get it done. And that requires people motivation skills. That requires tuning out all of the other hype and distraction. Are 26 year olds capable of this? Of course! But the 26 year old who can do this is exceptionally rare. The VAST majority of people only learn these skills over time... and come to realize them in their 40's and 50's.
This is why there are so incredibly few successful companies lead by 20-somethings. Say what you want about corporate america, but in this case, their greed reveals them. The "old boys club" can't motivate nearly as well as the bank. The fact that there are very few 20-something CEO's indicates that, except for the very rare case, 20-somethings don't yet have what it takes. If they did, there'd be no shortage of people following them to the bank.
$.02
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
1. the "old class relations" that sparked Marxism are essentially dead
2. The lesson of the modern economy is that businesses need to realize that no part of the company is less valuable than another.
The class relations are alive and well, it's just that statements like the above prove that the class war has been won - by the bosses. Only the working class is convinced there is no working class. Hint: management will never think that "no part of the company is less valuable than another." They spend most of their time attending seminars and classes to reinforce their worth and importance. Where have you been?
You need to read or travel more. If you think class is dead, you have never left the US or your first world comfort, or you have never worked, or you are just talking shit.
The article mentions Options as a great way to motivate nerds. I agree with this, but the options have to have potential to be worth something substantial.
For example I have been offered 4000 options at work at $1 each. The company is not public. Also these options take 4 years to vest. That's 0.016% of the company.
Now the number that you need to know is how many stocks exist. (Not outstanding, in Total number of shares) This number is not included in my option package so I had to ask. (It's 25 million).
The only way for me to make money is for my options to vest, and for the company to be sold or go public while I am there.
Let's say that the company is sold. This is what I would get based on the value of the sale.
25M = $0
50M = $4,000
100M = $12,000
1B = $156,000
So if my options are vested and the company sells for over $25 Million I might make some spare change. Considering the fact that I work for a small startup with less then 30 people these options are an insult.
So kids if you're getting an offer from a place with Stock Options; be sure to figure out what they are really worth.
He's generally right about the trend that people grossly overestimate the effect new revolutionary developments will have in two or three years, and greatly underestimate the effect it will have in 10+ years.
I do take issue with his emphasis on 'nerds' and 'style'. Of course the technically inept manager-types are called 'suits' because their fashion is attempting to hide technical incompetence, and nerds dress down to avoid that. But, its one thing to dress down to repel pretenders, it is another thing to avoid dressing up because you can't pull it off yourself.
He's over-romanticizing and overrating the nerd 'culture', which is essentially an over-focus on one tech competency to the exclusion of all else. Even when 'eccentric' single-minded tech or science types do get rich, they get far less than they would if they were more 'well rounded'. Even the tech-wealthy like BGates are arguably more competent at business and law than they are at tech.
The tech types will always need to develop real competence in broader areas of life and business if they want to be taken seriously. The lack of breadth is what marginalized CTOs and their IT departments. Rather than understanding the business well, finding innovative ways to become more competitve, and selling their vision as strategic peers, they focused on their infrastructure, workload, etc, and so became seen as plumbers, and were outsourced at the first opportunity. There are exceptions, but as a class, we've blown it.
Was it because the suits were too dense to see the opportunities presented, or because CTOs didn't make their innovative strategies heard -- who knows? But the result is the same.
Perhaps the best result is that the competent tech folks go off and form their own businesses, and sell stuff back to the suits at 5x the price; but that still requires much more than just the tech competence he extolls.
It'd be better if he was more clear about that.
The phone companies and cable held up that last couple of miles of high speed connection: the internet simply had no where to go.
It absolutely needed that high speed. Where there was no broadbant, the word was, hey, consumers don't need broadband! what's it good for!
Pictures, sound, VOIP, video, computer networking, always on communication, remote access, great big drives to hold that stuff, to back it up, processors to handle it and bigger lightweight screens, wireless communication.... dun!
Al Gore? A superhighway with no off ramps, Al. Doesn't work.
Communicism is thepolitics of envy.
It amazes me that communists who would love to destroy the working capital markets always measure things in term of income.
Wealth is a curse. The trust fund child is the most likely to end up the meth-head heroin whore.
You can't see this?
Wealth is a curse. Communism is wrong.
If you really believe in equality you would see that sociey provides so much just because we are here. We are all better off with the current system than having a revolution based on envy and power lusting miscontents.
Communism is a curse on the world designed by envious people who want to have everyone else do what they say.
It is slavery by the government. It is a failure.
This article leaves out the biggest effect of all: The Internet Bubble started a wave of manufacturing globalization which will forever change the United States economy. This is neither a bad thing or a good thing -- those who play the change right will make millions in the next 5 to 10 years, those who cling to bubble-era techtopia will crash and burn.
I was a founder/director of a New York webshop which I started and later sold for stupid amounts of cash to a bunch of guys who then still believed the "up up up" mantra of the day.
Our company built all kinds of supply-chain mgt. tools, extranets, inventory systems, etc. -- some of which was good, and some of which was thrown together from pieces of code I'd be embarrassed to post here.
The crazy thing is though -- that sh*t really did change the planet.
Two years ago (post bubble) I started a small (very small) manufacturing business building (we'll say "widgets") in China.
I was instantly struck by the fact that sourcing a manufacturer, monitoring production, sourcing raw materials, shipping, tracking inventory, selling and fulfilling are *ALL* internet enabled now -- by similar tools to the ones we had been building for the past 6 years. Not to mention the fact that if you know how to build/use those tools, you can beat the pants off businesses that are 10 times your size.
Now I have a slowly growing manufacturing business (struggling more than growing most weeks) which could not have existed pre bubble.
On a larger scale, this is a huge trend. The fact that the little guy can find a manufacturer overseas, produce widgets (literally anything you can think of), and go head to head with billion dollar manufacturing businesses is a fantastic degree of empowerment. And its completely a result of our "failed" internet bubble.
Anyway -- my two cents -- the time for building the tools is over. The time for using them is here.
Peace.
The real problem with stock options is not that CEOs are (yes, still today) making millions of dollars per year from options, but options are fundamentally flawed as an accounting measure. When granting an option, the company is increasing the number of shares their company offers, thereby decreasing the value per share from those who already own the company's stock. Furthermore, when creating options the companies do not have to claim them as an expense, as they do, say, employee salaries. So companies can hire employees for less with the promise of options, and reduce their expenses (since salaries are lower and options don't count against expenses), thereby (artificially) raising their bottom line. Who gets screwed in this are the public who purchased the shares at retail price.
Stock options are fine, but only if they are treated as an expense against the company's bottom line.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
What has happened in the past when this exact same situation came up is that the smart people who lost there jobs became available to do other things. The same thing will happen this time around. The nerds who are no longer programming will be free to spend their brain power on something else.
Byron Caplan puts it like this:
If you replace "downsizing" with "outsourcing" the sentiment is still true. It's detrimental to the economy as a whole to retain workers in the US when there are workers available elsewhere who are willing/able to do the job more efficiently. The US workers are not freed up to do something else and we (as a society) are forced to pay a premium wage for a less than efficient work force.
Each one of us outsources every day. I know of no technologist who also does all of the following:
- makes all of his/her own clothes
- grows or produces all of his/her own food
- builds his/her own house
- self insures against casualty
- produces their own electricty
- obtains, cleanses, and distributes their own water
- etc, etc, etc.
All of those things are outsourced by individuals to someone else. No one has the time to do ALL of that AND be a technologist. So what has happened when they outsourced those activities? It freed them up to be technologists. The same thing is true when the job of technologist gets outsourced to elsewhere. Smart people are freed up to do something else.Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Chairs. Comfortable chairs.
Note that the kind of people who make the decision to outsource jobs have nothing to worry about. They have enough money that if the US sinks into the ocean, they'll just go somewhere else.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
Yes, most of P G's articles are based on questionable assumptions and more questionable thesis statments..
With the regularity his screeds are being posted here, and the diviseness they seem to cause, I think he's a definite candidate to the be slashdot's resident ranter.
First off, he says he is coming from the vantage point of Yahoo.com. When Yahoo IPO'd, I knew "the market" had gotten ridiculous (the fact that Yahoo, was IPO'ing, never mind what it IPO'd at and went to). I had been buying stocks up to them using the fundamental analysis technique pioneered by Benjamin Graham. This is the technique the best stock pickers of the second half of the 20th century - Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch - use. Among all things it concentrates on profit and profit growth. Yahoo had made no profit, in fact it was losing money, so I knew it was ridiculous. In fact, I remember most clearly August 10th, 1995 when Netscape IPO'd and went to over 100. That's when the stock market bubble started in most estimations. I actually bought Netscape that day, and even made money on it. But I always felt the market was unstable after that, and I was right.
All this person sees is the small piece of ice on the top of a giant iceberg. He's still speaking in bubble-speak. The only thing connected to reality is #10, productivity. And everything he says within that is nonsense.
One thing neglected in all of his delusions that IPO's and Venture Capital in the mid-1990's created the massive Internet that we have today is the decades of government paid R&D, in the billions of dollars, through DARPA, that actually created the Internet. The Internet was a socialist, or, to be technical about it, a fascistly modelled (business/government cooperation) economic program. Decades of taxpayer dollars poured into R&D which creates something which *starting* in the mid-1990s can be used to start increasing productivity.
Economists have been debating whether or not productivity increased due to the Internet thus far and it very may well not have - it may take decades for that to hit. Despite all of the technical innovations in the early 20th century (cars, assembly lines), it wasn't until the end of World War II that any of this productivity was significantly felt, and that was after massive government involvement in the economy, starting with the New Deal, through the WWII almost total takeover of the economy by the government including rationing, on to Eisenhower and his "military" buildup. It wasn't all to strictly military purposes, the highway system was originally sold as a military expense (Original name the National Defense Highway System) along with the government funded R&D that created transistors, computers and so forth.
Also not mentioned is the severe world economic crisis that became apparent starting in the mid-1960's, started affecting things obviously in the early 1970's and which is still with us today. The average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage is below what it was 30 years ago. That does not sound like the economic utopia he is talking about - the US (and industrialized world) has been digging a whole for 30 years, with brief respites in the mid 1980s and late 1990s, where capital went hog wild during the short lived good period.
This person doesn't even seem to understand equity fundamental analysis within the current dominant economic viewpoint, never mind alternative economic viewpoints which see the economic system as even more fragile, which I subscribe to. Even dominant psyche stalwarts like Alan Greenspan or chief economists on Wall Street like Stephen Roach often speak gloomy things which you can read about in the Wall Street Journal, but not in the local newspaper for idiots with a big sports section on the back cover and local murder news on the front.
SO many Slashdotters seem to think that everyone is making 80K a year. The facts show that is not the case at all.
year 2000 Average After-Tax Income by Quintile:
80th-100th percentile:$141,400
60-79th percentile: $59,200
40-59th percentile: $41,900
20-39th percentile: $29,000
0-19th percentile $13,700
You can see that the bottom 40 percent take home 29K, and that was at the HEIGHT of the longest boom in a long while. It has gone downhill since then for most people. No class warfare, huh? Well, there should be....
You're being misleading if you don't include all the information. You're talking about after-tax income, but we need to know gross income and the tax rates as well to make any sort of judgment. If you gave us the same chart, but the tax rates were from the early 1900s, that would be a completely different thing than tax rates from another era; i.e, I don't think it would be all that bad if the 80th-100th percentile took home 141K if their tax rate was 90% and everyone else wasn't taxed at all. In any case, the bottom 40% probably doesn't have a very high effective tax rate, compared to the top 40%.
Also, this chart doesn't specify what kind of income it lists. If the top quintile takes home 141K mostly from capital gains income, well, that's a different story than a 300K salary.
Finally, averages are funny things -- I never trust averages without other information (like the median). It's nice to see that the 80th-100th percentile is 141K, but if the 99th-100th percentile is 1 billion dollars (e.g., Larry Ellison's $900 million stock sale in Jan 2001), while the 80th-81st percentile is $70K, the average is a little skewed.
... which is one more than you've had.
Other things notable about Graham which he can claim and you cannot:
So yeah, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt.
I think you need to clarify your definition of "class". Marx used it as a semi-permanent state of a individual. But "management" and "worker" are not semi-permanent states that take a lifetime to overcome, but temporary roles.
My boss only became my boss a couple of years ago. He only gets paid about 15% more than me. We live in the same neighborhood. We have the same level of education. The only "class" differences we have are that I came from the middle class and he came from the urban poor.
I can't get to anyone outside my "class" until I get up to the CEO and CFO, or down to the janitor. Everyone in between from the vice presidents to the landscapers are in the same socio-economic class as I. I know this because we live in the same neighborhoods and drive the same cars and our kids attend the same schools.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Interesting... on your webpage you proclaim the social-democracies of Europe to be superior to American free market society
[America is more socialist than free market, by the way. America is capitalist, by Karl Marx definition, but Marx has played quite the trick on us, taking the free market, calling it capitalism, and then changing the definition from unregulated market to Market Socialism. You probably won't be able to understand this, though.]
I have to ask... do you realize the continuously increasing amount of welfare accounts and welfare infrascture of these social-democracies that is being outsourced? The Netherlands... Germany... France... They're all slowly growing broke.
It's very funny that you talk of, and post quotes of others referring to, America preaching the evils of socialism and proclaiming that free markets rule, when a public education in America is anything but about a free market society.
Let's discuss your webpage:
Link: "Welfare State and Vacation"
The biggest error here is that American's are without health care. No, there is a large number of America's without health insurance, but not without health care. If you have an emergency, by law, you cannot be turned away from GOOD medical care. In return, you negotiate a payment plan at a later date, and if you could only afford to pay one dollar per week for the next twenty five years, the hospital agrees to it. What they do not do is let people get cosmetic surgery "for free", or let people get free massages or facial creme.
Did you know that when people perceive things as "free", they tend to use more of it? That's why the costs of those socialized health care systems in your touted social-democracies are becoming very heavy, and they cannot hold up over a longer period of time. Outsourcing accounts and infrastructure, as well as harnessing the Trade Bloc that is the E.U., are what is keeping these socialized systems afloat... unfortunately for them, it is only temporary.
Did you know that an ever increasing number of Canadians are coming into the United States for health care? Why? Because when you live in a socialized health care system, you have to get the bureaucracies consent in order to get care. This leads to several weeks, up to several months, of waiting for care -- including such things as serious hip surgeries. Yes, socialized health care is grand.
Link: "The American Prosperity Myth"
I'm assuming your understanding of economics is so limited that you fail to realize how fallacious the "trade deficit is". If you think about it, we all have trade deficits with stores like WalMart or a mom'n'pop store down the street. We buy from them all the time, but they don't buy from us [unless you also own a business]. Trade deficit? Nope. They buy elsewhere.
We might buy more from China than China does from us, but so what? We sell more to other countries wherein the other countries do not sell as much to us.
It's laughable to associate the welfare state with the success of European Union countries. The success of European Union countries is due to opening up of markets. You might try arguing that Ireland, the "European Tiger" or "Celtic Tiger" or whatever the hell you like to call it, only succeeded because of European Union investment, but that's complete bullshit. Ireland's economy has been surging on forward because of the liberalization of the market. It opened up its markets, pulled back layers of bureaucracy and unnecessary regulation, and started becoming an economic contender in Europe. This despite having very little natural resources, relatively speaking.
Link: "SocialDemocracy"
It is unfair to compare America with Scandinavian countries when you talk about standard of living, when you compare the diversity and immigration policies of the United States. to those Scandinavian countries. The Scandinavian countries know, that if they let more than a relatively small amount of people into the country, they'll fall flat on their f
Speckpot?
Oh get a clue.
In the real world real people need money to do real things. Try fucking tell me that I don't need lots of money and I or anyone else should be happy working my arse off earning shit wages the next time their son/daughter/husband/wife needs an operation, or when you want to send kids to school. For that matter if you want to own/rent a decent home you can't go to your bank manager and tell him see I'm not a sell out and expect to get what you need in life. See what a difference $100k will make to a kid's education and then tell me to go do something I enjoy for $30k a year.
If you were doing it for fun and didn't care about making money at it, it'd be a hobby. I'm not saying you should go and do something you absolutely hate for an extra $10k/yr. But if you can make a decent living chances are it won't be fulfilling some passion. You might write business software instead of scientific software for example. Basically you do something RELATED to what you enjoy and realise that to some extent you're going to burn that something as a passion/hobby, because after doing it so many hours a day for so many years you might not be as passionate about it.
People who are only passionate about their work are just as bad as if not worse than those who have other interests outside of their work. They get obsessed with their craft and don't see the big picture, and when something goes wrong at work they have nothing else to keep them happy. That's a one way ticket to bad health, both medical and physical. That's the kind of person that gets suicidal when they leave their job.
The phrase "work-life balance" is one that's often paid only lip service when times are good, but it is absolutely crucial.
IMHO most recruiters, employers and HR departments are clueless. I don't know how many fools I've talked to that just go out to find a candidate that will meet some narrow limited criteria. (You know the kind that wants a candidate who's a fool that'll work 80-120 hour weeks and just happens to have experience with the same goddamn J2EE app server the customer is). The same recruiters wonder why these people act like arrogant asses. The ins and outs of a particular piece of technology can be learnt. Its much harder to break the habbit of being too narrow and focused an individual.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
A marketing expert can put together an army of coders in India or Russia for pennies.
This was already happening during the Bubble. One of the companies we worked closely with was started by MBA types, and outsourced all their development to India. It was a disaster.
Outsourcing development is for banks who need to get reams of routine database software written, not for startups. If someone is really just a "marketing expert," they won't have the vision to tell the armies in Russia and India what to build.
His point about the rising power of nerds highlights something of great importance: the "old class relations" that sparked Marxism are essentially dead.
Marxism classifies people not by their place on a 'social ladder', but by ownership of means of production: capitalists own them (factories, resources, distribution chains etc.), and workers don't. Hence, the concepts like "middle class" are out of Marxist classification: you have only the capitalists and the workers.
Now, in post-industrial society the superficial contrast between the owner and the employee may not look so dramatic, but the distinctions still exists. A burger flipper doesn't own the restaurant, an engineer has no control over his corporation's marketing, distribution and financial resources, a scientist in a corporate research lab does not control the fate of the project he runs or the results of his work.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
"If you go to the average tech company, it is the developers and not the accountants or legal department or salesmen who are most likely to have travelled to Nepal or to know about Roman history."
True, some tech folks have interests in everything; they are among the most broadly competent people, and software is merely one of the things that they happen to do well. This broader lifestyle and image should be encouraged.
Unfortunately, this type does not predominate, and the many over-focused types give rise to the stereotype we all know. Note the author's definition of a nerd as "someone who doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself" -- overfocus.
The distinction between the two approaches to life is important, and it is unfortunate that it was glossed over in his article.
Even more important, and more unmentioned, is the fundamental asset that we almost all lack (and I'm no exception), which is an interest in sociopolitical power; We generally view it as a waste of time at best and unethical at worst.
We may be right to value substance, but we are dead right. This is what allows the suits to so mismanage the show, and take (steal) so much of the money. For example, I personally work with one guy who made a few hundred $K in the sale of a company of which he was one of the first 10 employees, but the CEO made $495Million; this wasn't a disparity of technical value, it was one of power management.
What's the fix? It almost seems like it is mutually exclusive -- if you are interested in the real substance of how things work, you aren't interested in power, and vice versa. I suppose we should at least be aware of it...
I don't know where you got this from, but even taking it at face value, remember that this is "average" by quintile. In other words, when you look at the 80-100% quintile, this is skewed upwards dramatically by the 98-100% slice that makes something like 500k/900k/6000k. And when you look at that last percentile in its components, it's probably something like 1000k/2000k/3000k/50000k.
Cheers,
Richard
Now women ask me where they can meet nerds. (The answer that springs to mind is "Usenix," but that would be like drinking from a firehose.)
Or you could just send them over to Slashdot.
The Internet genuinely is a big deal. That was one reason even smart people were fooled by the Bubble. Obviously it was going to have a huge effect. Enough of an effect to triple the value of Nasdaq companies in two years? No, as it turned out. But it was hard to say for certain at the time.
... more aptly, my voice could not be heard at all over the furious frauds being hawked to the public. Investment capital was being burned like cordwood, given far more heat than light, and the crackling sounds alone drowned out rational speech.
BULLSHIT. The bubble was perfectly obvious, but the "hype machine" was running at 110% throttle and didn't allow criticism of itself. People like myself were shouted down
The exact same thing is happening right now in the current bubble of American politics. It is perfectly obvious that America is starting WWIII, but the hype machine doesn't allow examination of that, much less criticism. After 1995, criticism of the Internet was squashed in a similar fashion; due to people's greed and hatred, they fully supported an irrational environment of operation. Hence it crashed. It could only crash.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
I was fortunate enough to snag mine at auction after the company evaporated, and it now sits at home. Why are good chairs so frequently overlooked in an industry made up entirely of people who sit on their asses all day?
If you do not like your job your attitude will affect others around you whose motivation may be to enjoy their job.
It IS valid to consider source motivation in hiring.
If all there was to life was being a productivity unit to serve a money engine then sure, your logic holds. But it isn't. And "how" you are productive does have impact on other peoples quality of life.
Personally, I think the selfish goal of life is to maximize the integral of enjoyment over one's lifetime. The unselfish goal would be to maximize the integral of society's enjoyment. Since when has the golden rule been replaced with "Treat others however necessary to be productive for the corporation"
Be careful! Stock options are a mess. A stock option is a non-cash expense that is not recorded on financial statements (the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, the Statement of Cash Flows). When you accept a stock option, you are choosing to replace real cash with a stock option. The option is income and you are taxed as if it was income. The option may have time limits on it. Your company better be really valuable by the time you can exercise your option.
Because high-tech firms have no cash or captial, they compensate employees with stock options. But think about it... if a firm has no cash, how do they have any value? Isn't the market going to figure this out soon? How will you ever cash in?
The accounting rules are changing, despite Silicon Valley lobbyist attempts. New rules will make companies EXPENSE options in the accounting period in which they were issued. This will have 2 immediate effects:
One more accounting benefit from stock options: When you finally exercise the option, the company pays the difference b/t option price and market stock price. This expense is tax deductible. By reduces taxes, you create a "gain". This gain is booked as income from continuing operations. Some high tech firms derive over 50% of such income from "gains" due to stock options being exercised.
Investors expect income from continuing operations to be a real indicator of a companies ability to produce future earnings. The stock price is the markets estimate of the present day value of future earnings. It is not just quantity of earnings, but QUALITY of earnings that set stock prices.
So.... stock options let companies decieve investors in the present day. But investors will figure this out sooner or later. Once they do, the stock price will fall. When the stock price falls, what good does it do you to have an option?
My recommendation: Take cash, not options. If you get options, sell them. Who cares if it is worth pennies on the dollar. Sell them now, take the money and don't look back. We probably have one more fiscal year before stock options will have to be expensed. When this day finally comes, all the high tech firms will be significantly devalued in the market.
...for those of us who never heard of it:
When: 1711
Where: United Kingdom
The amount the market declined from peak to bottom: In 1711, stocks in the South Sea Company were traded for 1000 British pounds (unadjusted for inflation) and then were reduced to nothing. A massive amount of money was lost.
Rest of the article: http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crash es3.asp
- Who needs a sig?
So 40% of the households take home $29K or less....
By your interpretation of your own statistics, 100% of the housholds take home $141K or less. I think you may need to reinterpret . . .