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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."
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!!
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.
"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, and our economy would be nonexistant.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Indeed, see Tim Bray's comments on Why XML Doesn't Suck 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, 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.
Eric
HTTP header viewer
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).