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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?
"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!
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
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).
But I'm thinking Zonk got taken on this one. That VOware link is informative, why?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Many said the same about Google.
un burrito me trampeó.
Problem stems from the fact that 90% of all conference calls are useless wastes of time. If I did not join in from my desk and then mute the mic and then promptly ignore everything (I record to my iRiver though) I would not get anything done. On a specific project we have at LEAST 5 conference calls a week on the subject, typically going for 1 to 2 hours and talking about crap we covered the last 5 calls.
conference calls are a waste of time now days because they are overused and nothing productive is done with them anymore.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
I'm currently working on some integration issues. XML/SOAP is a whole lot simpler than the way it used to be. Sure, you still have to map the fields and make sure the data are compatible, but having the interface well defined, the protocol well defined makes it a helluva lot easier to do "many-to-many" integration, whereas before everything was custom built to make one system fit another.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's a people problem. People like to feel and look important, and one big way to do that is to hold meetings. Many aspiring managers hold pointless meetings where they get to hear themselves talk for an hour for the sole purpose of justifying their existance. They will use whatever medium is available to them, be it an in person meeting, conference call, online meeting, whatever. Until this cultural problem is somehow solved, pointless meetings will be a regular way of life in most companies.
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.
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.
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.