No, that's an example of terrible board oversight. The whole point of a Board of Directors is that they have a fiduciary duty to represent shareholder and company interests and are supposed to be composed of a mix of folks representing different constituencies.
No, you can't just take McB's personal responsibility in this away and blame the BoD. McB convinced the BoD and they accepted it. Isn't that why CEOs have golden parachutes? They can do whatever they want, right or wrong, and if fired, walk away with multiple-millions for their high-priced skills that no one else could possibly do. You see this cause and effect almost daily.
U.S. Business 101--unfortunately.
--
-glenn-
Re:One Point For Gmail
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
Correct. No software does.
Re:One Point For Gmail
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
...(this is a redhat 9 machine, no uncontrolled reboots, restarts, or failures, powered by a 1500 watt 100% online [sinewave] UPS.) Backup is every evening to a separate machine done via cron controlled copy, then archive and copy. If the main server fails, I can log into the backup machine. It's been up less time because I stuck a sound card in it (cheap Dell server -- no sound) and had to turn it off to do so. Just 403 days. So as you can see, I don't much worry about my mail system going down when I go out of town.:-)
either way I'm betting Google is more reliable.
I bet they're not. My arrangement has been rock solid
I've been that route: run everything myself. Sure it has it's good points, like you indicate, but I decided it's just too much of a headache (as someone else also just pointed out).
I think the best of both worlds is GMail along with Thunderbird. If Google were to pull the GMail rug out from under me I have Thunderbird as a back-up, local copy of all my email (and it also houses some email I don't do via GMail). So I'm on GMail every day and maybe once a week fire up Thunderbird and all my GMail (and other email) gets pulled down locally to my RAID 0 SATA drives. I think that my basement would flood (hence destroying all my servers) before Google and/or GMail were to go under.
Just one way to manage email.
It has also been argued that if you have a system running on the order of a year or even many months then you have not been diligent in applying security patches (and other patches). I run FreeBSD on most of my servers and could have uptimes of a year or two but then the systems wouldn't be secure. An uptime of 403 days is nothing to brag about, IMO.
Re:Marketing expenses taken in perspective:
on
Vonage IPO
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· Score: 1
If a company intends to be as large as the incumbents, they'll need equivalent marketing - regardless of their current number of customers.
I don't think that's true; I think that's an MBA talking. For example, I don't recall Google dumping hundreds of millions into advertising.
Vonage could "grow" its revenue so that its relatively fixed high-profile national marketing expense becomes a much smaller fraction of its expenses without reducing its actual marketing expenses a dime. Remember that the amortized cost for the first customer of a startup company that spent $100 million developing its products is $100 million per customer. If the customer growth is exponential while the marketing expenses are linear, the amortized cost declines rapidly with time.
Now this belongs in their prospectus. I never can read those things.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's an example of terrible board oversight. The whole point of a Board of Directors is that they have a fiduciary duty to represent shareholder and company interests and are supposed to be composed of a mix of folks representing different constituencies.
No, you can't just take McB's personal responsibility in this away and blame the BoD. McB convinced the BoD and they accepted it. Isn't that why CEOs have golden parachutes? They can do whatever they want, right or wrong, and if fired, walk away with multiple-millions for their high-priced skills that no one else could possibly do. You see this cause and effect almost daily.
U.S. Business 101--unfortunately.
-- -glenn-
Correct. No software does.
I bet they're not. My arrangement has been rock solid
I've been that route: run everything myself. Sure it has it's good points, like you indicate, but I decided it's just too much of a headache (as someone else also just pointed out).
I think the best of both worlds is GMail along with Thunderbird. If Google were to pull the GMail rug out from under me I have Thunderbird as a back-up, local copy of all my email (and it also houses some email I don't do via GMail). So I'm on GMail every day and maybe once a week fire up Thunderbird and all my GMail (and other email) gets pulled down locally to my RAID 0 SATA drives. I think that my basement would flood (hence destroying all my servers) before Google and/or GMail were to go under.
Just one way to manage email.
It has also been argued that if you have a system running on the order of a year or even many months then you have not been diligent in applying security patches (and other patches). I run FreeBSD on most of my servers and could have uptimes of a year or two but then the systems wouldn't be secure. An uptime of 403 days is nothing to brag about, IMO.
If a company intends to be as large as the incumbents, they'll need equivalent marketing - regardless of their current number of customers.
I don't think that's true; I think that's an MBA talking. For example, I don't recall Google dumping hundreds of millions into advertising.
Vonage could "grow" its revenue so that its relatively fixed high-profile national marketing expense becomes a much smaller fraction of its expenses without reducing its actual marketing expenses a dime. Remember that the amortized cost for the first customer of a startup company that spent $100 million developing its products is $100 million per customer. If the customer growth is exponential while the marketing expenses are linear, the amortized cost declines rapidly with time.
Now this belongs in their prospectus. I never can read those things.