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New Golden Age for Outside-the-Box Startups?
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."
Everything your team needs for sharing documents blah blah Its called exchange?
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?
"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?
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
And of course what allows all this magic to happen? Why SOA of course!
It harnesses the power of an ASCII text stream!!!
I predict this XML technology will soon take over the internets.
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.
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?
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
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 have, it looks like it's from the 80s
Statements such as
;o|
"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
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Companies will use B2B to quickly build a business and the required market relationsips. Then narrowly focus on filling a niche and will stay focused on that niche (instead of becomming a larger one-stop-eShop).
"Companies can communicate with each other in many ways. Startups will attempt to get their money by providing small unique services rather than a comprehensive solution."
Hmm... At least that's how I read it...
Can I short these guys on the day of the IPO?
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).
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
But I'm thinking Zonk got taken on this one. That VOware link is informative, why?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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...
Oh well, what the hell...
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 applications that have adapted to the latest technology. There have always been businesses that are here one day and gone the next, from trinket vendors following the trail of Roman Legions to the pop-up hotdog stands that show up wherever there is a large gathering of people. This is the same thing, just utilizing the latest technology. Mankind's greatest ability is not language or the use of tools, but his amazing adaptability to new situations.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
Hey, here's the perfect page for this topic. It will generate the name of a Web 2.0 company and product description in seconds!
My business: Farstrider Studios.
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?
That being said, let's review:
Now, personally, I think the original article is a bit silly...but asking me to agree with you that it's a bad idea because YOU'RE A STUDENT and THEREFORE I should agree with you is just inane.
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.
new phenomenon among startups, the 'momentary enterprise'.
Actually, Tom Peters dealt with the concept extensively in his 1993 book, Liberation Management. 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.
Artificial intelligence is the prime example of a Golden Age for outside-the-box developers.
The AI User Manual tells how to get started in Outside-the-Box Artificial Intelligence.
The Mind.Forth AI Engineshows that you can work on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) without perpetuating the colossal failures of the traditional AI Establishment.
The AGI Mail Archive is a community forum of AI Outside-the-Boxers.
A Web site on PC-based robots sports an outside-the-box A.I. Zone where you may think outside the box about putting artificial intelligence into hi-tech robots.
Don't trust anyone else to look after your precious data. MS 'lost' source code, Banks lost 'credit card details', and fly-by-nighters have 'sold' lists and contacts. Nope, the family jewels stay put. The thought of others grepping company reports makes ones skin crawl.
When article content is zero, then 2 * 0 == 0, so the editors can't be accused of posting dupes ever. :P
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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.
A.
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 getting in on a boom, say the "dot com" boom the year BEFORE its a household word and trying to get in the year AFTER every body with a server thinks he is a player?
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.
Funny how this article came out while Cory Doctorow is serializing a novel 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.
No, it won't work.
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...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Grove network is not in anyway an example of the business models that the article proposes. Its actually Ozzie's addition to microsoft.
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.
That really sounds like the way some R&D and games are done. Come together, do something, disband. Just the core infrastructure stays the same. There is one thing that makes this much easier. Technology, and a good support structure. Note that a small company can easily be put together from leased and rented parts and services. The only part that doesn't deal with quick change is of course, government.
--
BTW From a wannabe businessman to a businessman. I'm looking at starting a SOHO doing software appliances. Maybe using something like Vista since this city is heavy on the medical community. e.g. hospitals, doctors offices, even universities (UIPUI, Butler).
Any advice on getting started?
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' (though like a real journal article, it's not free and doesn't have Flash adverts and videos in the middle).
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 wonder if there's some legal mechanism for this. Otherwise LLCs could skip out on liabilities by quickly dissolving before those liabilities are recognized. I also wonder if a clever lawyer could pierce LLC protection if they proved that the investors knew of the liability or participated in the avoidance of that liability by dissolving the entity.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"Who's going to purchase an IT solution from a business that admittedly is only going to be around for several more months?"
Sounds like the Open Source business model.
'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'.
We are an in-the-closet start-your-own-company startup who wants to be out-of-the-blue company. To do that we are planning to raise investment from an over-the-sky VC and become off-the-scale enterprise, being bought by the end of the fiscal year by a without-a-doubt big conglomerate. ;)
AND by the way, we are web2.0 compliant so we believe we will flip before we flop and be able to mashup our deep-web syndication of bubble open-source companies' databases making a killer eCPM by SEOing their portals to attract eyeballs and by that raise valuation and eventually exit by IPOing to the generally buzzword-ignorant investor in the bullish stock market.
"From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen" - Cat Stevens
1999 just called. They want their irrational exuberance back.
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.
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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
;-)
I regularly have to deal with software that assumes that input is in whatever encoding the authors happen to think is "universal" (utf-8, ucs-2, utf-16, ucs-4, 7-bit ASCII, ISO-8859-[1-15], cp-blah, and so on). It's horrific. Thankfully it's less commonplace with XML, which can be reasonably expected to be utf-8 or UCS-2 (but sometimes utf-16), but enough apps just write out a document with the current locale's encoding to be problematic. Some toolkits and libraries even encourage it with DOMs that handle text encoding issues inconsitently or ignore them, then make it worse by not writing out a <?xml processing directive .
I've already bought the nice heavy wooden bat. I'll be painting "text encodings" and "clue" on it in the coming holidays, and I'm still very tempted to add some nails. I'm in Perth, Western Australia, so I don't meet all that many other OSS developers, but I'll be bringing it when I do
This little rant isn't aimed at you, by the way - it's more in agreement with you really. It's very much inspired by the parent poster, though it's not their fault (if they're not programming they don't need to know or care, and even if they do they were probably just being sloppy. It's not code, after all.).
Nowadays just about everything is "on steroids."
In my day all we had was "Turbo."
My parents had to settle for "o-matic".
No, wait. The original is still relevant. My mistake.
I want 2 get in teh gay faggot box how do i do it plzthx
tar -xvzf yomomma.tar.gz
I realized that I should have elaborated on the Vista I was talking about (figured the 'healthcare' would be a clue, but you know this crowd).
I see that others have a similiar idea.
When did conning people into spending thier money on something that will be useless in a few months become something worthy of praise?
Our bedhopping social mores are leaking into business practice? That's a nightmare? Perhaps, but a natural extension across th' table is what it is. Brad Pitt, running, jumping, stabbing the sword into his opponent BEFORE THE OPPONENT CAN MOVE! See a girl, sitting at the bar, run and jump with the one-liner before she can say yes to the guy on her left. hahahaha Inventing a new widget that's easily reverse-engineered? Drown the marketplace with a wide-angle X-Mart blast, make the lion's share before your opponent grabs it, runs around the block, returns running with his copied widget ... Jumping in the air he stabs you with his cloned (your) widget. Sounds reasonable to me but uhm sorry about your job prospects. GUESS YOU'LL HAVE TO RUN FASTER, LEAP BUILDINGS IN A SINGLE BOUND. IS IT A BIRD? IS IT A PLANE? NO! IT'S MODERNMAN. http://www.newpath4.com/911%2BMessage%2Bto%2BFox%2 BNews%2BHosts%2BBill%2BO'Reilly%2BNeil%2BCavuto%2B John%2BGibson.htm#billoreillyscreamsfoul_sayshissh owandthetelevisionmediadoesnotseednewmurdersingeor giaoranywhereelse_weareinnocent For what it's worth guy your job isn't the only one being shaken from its tree. http://www.newpath4.com/TheIraquiStoryofWar2001200 220032004200520062007culpabilityoffoxnewsagencyand departmentofenergyfornottellingpresidentbushaboutn ewcarenginesolutionfromnewpath410262005.gif
BTW, IAAE.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent