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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!
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
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).
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.
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.
Yes - but can't you see the "Certified Microsoft Solutions Provider" banner at the top? That should put all your fears to rest right there ;-)
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'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.
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.
I thought this was an article about booting from a network device. Woe is me.
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"?
The problem with conference calls and meetings is mainly that the people calling them typically don't understand how to hold a productive one (and therefore may call them unnecessarily, leading to overuse). There are an incredibly large number of ways to hold unproductive calls and meetings, but the window within which one can hold a productive call or meeting is very small.
As a traveling consultant, I spend a lot of time on calls, and I can tell you that there are a lot of calls that just distract me and accomplish nothing. However, there are also a large number of calls that are the only way to resolve issues involving multiple decision makers. Without those calls, I would also accomplish nothing.
I've seen a week's worth of e-mail debate get resolved in a five-minute conference call with the right people involved and the right chairperson. I think what we really need is just for more people to understand what meetings should and should not be used for, and how you can actually make a meeting useful.
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).
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.
Nowadays just about everything is "on steroids."
In my day all we had was "Turbo."
My parents had to settle for "o-matic".