Slashdot Mirror
Dot Con: How Infospace Took Investors For A Ride
Jeff writes "On the subject of the dot com crash, the Seattle Times recently ran an outstanding three day series on the corruption at Infospace, with a follow up today on the company's continued relations with its founder, Naveen Jain. Sunday's cover photo of Jain's new office shows a birthday photo of himself and another self-portrait in the background. Only the reflecting pool is missing."
The real reason there isn't the incredible outcry over conmen like Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, and the man linked is because people don't realize that they, too, are part of the "investor class." Many people think that Enron's failure resulted in nothing more than a few robber barons transplanted from the 19th century having to switch their Cuban cigars to Dominican; they don't realize that they are being hit in the pocketbook, and that people who invested large amounts their life's savings were taken for a ride.
As for investors not doing enough research, that's simply not true. If you will remember, it was a fairly large scandal a few months ago that stock analysts - people who are hired by brokerages to deliver an unbiased analysis - were rating stocks highly, but privately commenting that those stocks weren't worth the paper their certificates were printed on. The end result was that investors who did everything "right" and read all the research available were actually more likely to get ripped off than someone who simply picked stocks because they had a cool-sounding name.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
You don't trust Bush and the current administration. You think you are (and you very well might be) smarter than them. Yet you trust them with your money more than you trust yourself.
Nice disconnect there.
Oh, honey, we can't even get rid of the dumb ones. How long did the HP board take to ditch Carly? Three years after the Compaq merger, and well after she screwed up everything else at HP too? Another example: I worked for a guy at [ConsumerProductCompany] who insisted we stick to the the original memory spec even though Moore's law told us we could count on twice the memory by release. Recoding to fit the tight space delayed ship long enough the original RAM was obsoleted, forcing us to redesign the memory controller, and all of which pushed the release late enough that Sony stomped us like a steamroller crushing baby chicks. That guy's now a CTO at another outfit. Hell, Apple alone endured a number of inept CEOs, including a guy who'd crawl under his desk when the going got rough.
And remember, the VCs funded all the dot-bombs five or six years ago and told them to spend like mad to get "first-mover advantage", so we're not necessarily talking the brightest bulbs on the tree here.
Long story short, if even the dumb CEOs get multiyear grace periods and chances to screw up again repeatedly, how do you expect to catch the sharks smart enough to cover up their schemes? Especially, I should note, when luminaries such as Gates and Ellison have both prospered and made their venture investors prosper while being accused of sharp trading. That'll tend to discourage scrutiny so long as the numbers remain rosy.
Long story short, whoever in the blogosphere wrote that fatuous thing you paraphrased is talking out his ass.