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."

Comments

Didnt we have this already?

[daxomatic]

Everything your team needs for sharing documents blah blah Its called exchange?

Blah blah blah corporatespeak blah blah blah

[Cyburbia]

"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?

Re:Blah blah blah corporatespeak blah blah blah

[maxwell demon]

Here's the translation. All irrelevant stuff has been removed.
--- begin of translation ---
--- end of translation ---
Hope this helps.

Grand

[grasshoppa]

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.

XML technology is so amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

It harnesses the power of an ASCII text stream!!!

I predict this XML technology will soon take over the internets.

I love the department name

[K.B.Zod]

It certainly could be the beginning of the next bubble. Joel Spolsky doesn't think much of the "Web 2.0" hype, which I think this article may be buying into.

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.

Not another "new" economy.

[plasmacutter]

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).

But who do we sue?

[G4from128k]

Sound like this might creates some apoplectic lawyers. If a company lasts only a few months, it's going to be a difficult target for lawsuits. By the time the plaintiff finds a lawyer or the case goes to court, the company is gone.

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?

Y'know...

[Otter]

I'm not one of the people always yelling that stories here are paid ads: "Slashvertisement! Astroturfer! Roland Picqupiale!!!!"

But I'm thinking Zonk got taken on this one. That VOware link is informative, why?

Start your company now!

[Tumbarumba]

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!

You Young Kids

[serutan]

Nowadays just about everything is "on steroids."
In my day all we had was "Turbo."
My parents had to settle for "o-matic".