Figure 1: The NYNEX FootprintMy telephone began ringing in November, 1996: "You guys are merging, right? What's going to happen to S&T?".
NYNEX Science & Technology, Inc., as it was, my employer for a good six years, by then, was the independent research and development facility that NYNEX Corporation had set up at the time that American telephone giant American Telephone and Telegraph was broken up, into smaller localized operating companies, also knows as RBOCs, or Regional Bell Operating Companies, and long distance telecommunications providers.
Having an R&D facility was part of the culture, in telecommunications, harking back to Bell Laboratories, originally intended as the centralized research facility for the entire telecommunications industry. That name is rather famous - while the Bell symbol obviously refers to a telephone ringing device, the original Bell Labs was named after Alexander Graham Bell, who started the whole thing by inventing the telephone in the first place, in 1876.
Over time, research done at Bell Labs, and other places like it, was often pure science, and one was allowed, and even encouraged, to work on inventions that may have been in some way related to telecommunications, but had little factual connection to the business of telecommunications. The transistor, for instance, the world's first semiconductor device, was invented at Bell Labs in 1947. That crafty piece of physics had very little to do with telephony, but telecommunications as we know it would certainly not be possible without semiconductors. The laser, as well as the UNIX operating system, both came from the same source - again, without laser we would not today have large scale optical storage devices, such as CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs, while UNIX made multiprocessing, multitasking and multithreading possible on what today seem to be rather primitive microprocessors.
When NYNEX was created, a company that combined local telephone companies in the states of New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts,Maine and Rhode Island, it seemed natural that a number of Bell Labs scientists would join the new company, which, after all, was headquartered less than seventy miles from Bell Labs, and set up "their own" Bell Labs, and so,in 1984, NYNEX Science & Technology, popularly known as NYNEX S&T,was created.
Figure 2: The Six Regional
Bell Operating Companies, as of October, 1997.
Figure 3: Bell Atlantic
Statistics, as of November 1, 1997
Of course, the telephone calls I, and many of my colleagues, began to receive in 1996 related to the announced intention of a merger between NYNEX and Bell Atlantic, the latter another of the original seven RBOCs, just to the South and West of us. It was said to be known that "Bell Atlantic isn't big on R&D" and we also heard rumours about our being sold off to the highest bidder, or that a condition of the merger was that we were shut down, as S&T was not a profit centre.
To make a long story short, many colleagues left, in the run-up to the merger, and there is, today, no longer an independent research centre in White Plains. It is, however, very much my question whether there ever was, and whether what I and my colleagues do today is so vastly different from what commercial scientists do, in general, in such laboratories.
The term "commercial scientist", which is what I am, seems to me to be indicative of not-quite-pure research, especially if you consider that we work on the products that our company sells. There was quite a bit of turmoil, when it became clear that our work focus might be shifting,and even more when about half of the groups in my organization were moved into the Information Systems Division, and we were told very clearly that research was no longer our focus.
I come from the commercial world, IBM first, and then a small entrepreneur's existence (I still have the bruises), and I had always questioned how much "research" was really applicable to a company that has telecommunications sales as its primary focus. When you look at commercial laboratories, like IBM's T.J. Watson Research, and Bell Labs, which has now been split between AT&T and Lucent Technologies, when those two divorced, the conclusion that technological advances only sporadically came out of those institutions is inescapable. For every theoretical scientist in our organizations, thereare probably several hundred working on new services, using existing technologies, or new technologies, driven by existing services.
Figure 4: R&D as
reported on balance sheets
In both cases, the motivator is profit, we either need to create new or increased revenues, or we need to decrease the cost of existing services. That is much of my work, right there, my group has two products, an operator workstation that serves to reduce the amount of time an operator spends on a customer call, and an automated operator platform that provides some of the functionality human operators do, using speech- and voice recognition.
It has been an extraordinary privilege for me to follow both of these products practically from their inception to full production - our operator workstation has been "out in the field" (this is how we refer to the real world) for a couple of years now, and the first service will go live on our automated platform in the next few months - and get a better understanding of what it takes for a dream to become utter boredom (which is how I sometimes refer to the real world). In terms of research, I and my colleagues have gathered a tremendous knowledge base about how people work, how they communicate, how you can make repetitive tasks more palatable, how repetitive tasks will always be repetitive tasks, but most of all, what we have learned is how the success of one's brainchild is as much governed by politics (any kind) as it is by the quality of it.
Perhaps that is the overriding lesson, and, at the same time, the big paradox of commercial research: Especially in North America, you're not really successful if your product doesn't sell - but then, if it does, you are no longer a scientist, you're a manager - which is the one function a scientist isn't trained to perform…
At the same time, if you look at academic research, if you walk the hallowed halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is easy to recognize that the most popular students are those whose projects get the most funding - funding, of course, that largely comes from the commercial world. And while the contributors to scientific research certainly live by the rules - no commercial influence - the students themselves are all too aware that they're here to achieve a career, and for that to happen, you're going to have to find someone to employ you. That, by itself, already injects a lot of "commercial" into science. Even the halls of medicine have now been overtaken by commercial "managed care" and "health maintenance", and ecology, too, can now be funded by something called "eco-tourism" (neat trick, that - first you get people to pay you for allowing them to kill much of your wildlife - then, you get them to pay you for re-breeding that wildlife, and putting it back where it was in the first place, preferably with a fence around it).
Yet, if you look at it carefully, there really is little pure academic science - whatever research is done, some way of funding it has to be available, and very few research programs continue to exist if they do not, at some point in their existence, produce some tangible result. Down the road, there is always the profit motive. This is especially true in commercially funded laboratories - just open up the webpage of AT&T Labs, and look at the list of inventions, and you will note that only three of the list, "The Wave Nature of Matter", "Radio Astronomy", and "The Echo of the Big Bang", have not had a direct result, in terms of commercialization. That's three out of thirty-six, or 8.3%, and that number is probably a fairly good indicator of the percentage of projects in commercial research that are not directly related to productivity.
Ajit Kambil, Assistant Professor of Information Systems at New York University, writes in his 1995 course syllabus:
Technological advances during World War II, and innovations from Bell Labs enabled AT&T by 1949 to become the largest company in the world with well over 80 percent of the market for communications services. As a vertically integrated company (see Table below), AT&T was also able to reap benefits from the technological advances that reduced the costs of long distance transmission.
In other words, the research done at AT&T's commercial facilities had much to do with the company's commercial success, especially if you consider that traditionally, American telephone companies not only provided all kinds of telecommunications and interconnection services (controlling everything from simple home wiring right through to the transmission of radio and television programming), they also manufactured their own equipment (Northern Telecom International began its life as Western Electric, a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T).
There was, of course, a very good reason for AT&T to do research, and to manufacture its own equipment. Even at the end of World War II, the telephone system was still largely dependent on human operators to connect calling parties, and telephone switches were electro-mechanical. With the post-war population explosion, unionization of the workforce, and the advent of television, the volume of communications vastly increased,and providing faster switching, and cheaper ways of interconnecting people,became important to an increasingly profit conscious industry. The singlemost important factor in all this was, of course, the transistor, inventedat Bell Labs in 1947 - not a complete surprise, then that the switch toend all switches would be invented by the telecommunications industry.
We do not face the same situation today. I can't remember the last time we needed a truly new technology in order to be able to provide new facilities, or services. If anything, it is software development that is at the forefront of research, today, and I have so far not seen anything written in Java that couldn't have been done in another programming language. Much is going on under the surface, of course, but true technological advances, today, are few and far between, and insofar as they do exist, are usually prohibitively expensive. Clear is that we consume technology developments as fast as we can produce them - I have begun ordering three gigabyte removable hard disks for our laptops, as two gigabytes really is insufficient to run a Microsoft operating system, and all of the applications one needs,in an ordinary working day. It is curious that some of the "plug-ins" that one needs to use a Web browser can easily consume a megabyte of disk space or so, making the process of plugging not only elaborate, but also expensive - we are currently using Internet and Ethernet bandwidth as if its cost is low, when in fact a bonded ISDN line, at 128 kilobits per second, is marginal, for the professional user.
More than ever before, the user is the guinea pig - at the current cost of development, it is no longer feasible to invest sufficient funds into a new facility to allow for adequate testing, and new products and services are rolled into the marketplace apace, to see if they survive or not.
Figure 5: Examples of
mobile telephone service inventions since the late 'eighties.
That's what it is all about, today, money - all around us, in our particular marketplace, we see that there is little growth in our installed base, while usage emphasis is changing into areas we never thought it would go. In my particular industry, the growth in the number of access lines is such that large urban areas in the United States are running out of area codes, without the usage on those lines providing significant new revenues - reading email, or sending faxes, is "bursty" traffic, and with modems getting ever more sophisticated, in terms of compression algorithms and speed, more data can be transmitted in less time. And time is still the basis for our telephony revenues, at a time when the consumer, corporate as well as private, needs ever better line quality, and more of it.
A good example of development that went nowhere is the modular PC, the computer that could be upgraded by simply replacing its components, this to enable the market to keep up with technological advances more easily, and at lower cost. Then came the NetPC, essentially the core of a computer, that would get much of its operating system directly from the Internet - Only last week Compaq announced PCs at a price of less than $900, effectively killing upgradable and Net PCs, and probably sounding the death knell for developments like WebTV, as well - why would anyone invest in any of these "half-PCs", when they can get the real thing for the same price?. All of the above are very viable technologies, and probably could have had significant advantages for the user, but behind it all is a race in which industries need to maximize existing investments, and retain market share, and are perfectly prepared to shove product into the marketplace at a near loss, simply to ensure that other killer industries will not gain the upper hand.
Microsoft has proved very adequately that you can gain the upper hand, and keep it, simply by aiming in one direction, and never stopping the hard push, don't take off the blinders. Intel has had to almost completely redesign its processor line, and the chipsets surrounding it, in order for the new flavours of Windows to work properly - if you look at it carefully, today's PCs utilize only the merest core of the original IBM PC-AT, everything else has been very extensively redesigned. Only a few years ago, this led to new types of computers, with processors dedicated to the particular operating systems they were running - Commodore's Amiga is a good example. It is, finally, the marketeers that found the perfect answer to introducing new technologies unobtrusively - design a new operating system on a new microprocessor, give it all the same names as the previous generation, but announce that for the enhancements to work your PC has to be plug-and-play compatible, and there you have it: the repackaged unpackaging of a new invention. Everything is new and different, but it looks the same - look and feel into the extreme, it is, after all, now patentable, so why should anyone really care what is underneath?
But I digress. We were talking about corporate research,and where it went.
Figure 6: The Bell Atlantic
"Region" - all this has special needs!
The list is (literally) endless. Where we once developed and built our own support systems, switches, connectivity equipment, those that used to build these things under our corporate umbrellas went away, started their own companies, and no longer work exclusively for us, but for everyone like us. In doing so, the focus of research simply shifted, and much of it isn't called research any more, it is development. Ever since downsizing in NYNEX Corporation began, I have seen large numbers of colleagues accept the retirement package, only to be snapped up by the manufacturing industry. The list is endless, and the majority of what we call "Subject Matter Experts", or SME's, go to equipment manufacturers,from Motorola and Northern Telecom to Nokia and Lucent Technologies.
This trend alone makes it clear that there is more of a shift in research focus, than that American research is experiencing what we so eloquently call "negative growth". There is probably more research focus in venture capital startups, today, and, rather than their being funded by the large corporations, they're being funded by venture capital funds and Wall Street, and, ultimately, by the larger companies that now buy up the successful startups.
Only last week (as I write this), Microsoft acquired Hotmail, a World Wide Web free electronic mail provider (and one that, not coincidentally, provides free email only when accessed online, as opposed to retrievable mail, for which one is charged), while Bay Networks took a stake in Netspeak Corp., a startup that has developed a voice-over-IP technology. Electronics giant Rockwell announced "the formation of an alliance" with Smart Technologies,Inc., for the marketing of call center solutions - Rockwell has over one hundred plants and 45,000 employees world wide, Smart has…. one plant, and 130 employees. Intel took a stake in software maker Platinum, Inc., adding to the long list of small companies it already subsidizes. In many ways, these strategic alliances mean that startups have reasonable assurance they will continue to exist, as large corporations cannot provide products or services to their corporate clients that will then be discontinued.
Venture capitalists are making very good money, getting tax breaks on failed ventures, and making large profits on the sales of their stakes in new ventures to larger corporations. Venture Capital company Draper Fisher Jurvetson, of Redwood City, CA, sums it all up rather concisely on its web page:
"A start-up venture capitalist becomes a company's financial strategist, headhunter, investment banker, and corporate therapist, who provides support and confidence to a fledgling team. As a board member, we are active, and we have the energy, experience and contacts to help take the company to the next stage and beyond."
That spells control, and the name of the game is selling- "the next stage and beyond". Not selling your product, but selling you, as an entrepreneur, after putting into your venture whatever it is the market, today, needs a startup to have. No self respecting company, would today buy a startup if the Chief Financial Officer didn't come from a renowned venture capital firm, and their only charge is to maximize the investment the company has in you.
Draper Fisher Jurvetson is an original investor in Hotmail- started in 1995 by two former Apple Computer developers, Hotmail began providing service in 1996, and was acquired just a year later by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum (rumoured in the Wall Street Journal to be as muchas 300 million U.S. dollars!). With that, Microsoft gained a service that has gathered about 9.5 million subscribers worldwide - that has to be the largest commercial mailing list on Earth… As Hotmail must be read while connected to the Internet, I have always wondered why it wasn't snapped up by an international telephone company, as Internet providers mostly charge flat rates, these days, while telephone companies charge their lines by the minute.
Hotmail is a very good example of research as it is done today. Two researchers (for all I know they were "downsized" by Apple) start up their own venture, attracting West Coast venture capital. They pass the "needing revenues" hurdle by setting up a service that generates none from its users, build, as a consequence, a very large, world wide, customer base, each and every one of which already has an email address, and then they get snapped up.
Yet, underneath it all, the people at Hotmail have garnered an incredible amount of expertise in providing a large scale service - both technologically, and in terms of the user interface. They have done, in one year, what a small scale laboratory user test could never do in a decade, and they've done it across national and continental boundaries.
So what is the success ratio, for this type of research (if that's what it is)? If we look once more at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, they list 109 startups in their portfolio. Of these, 16, or 15%, were sold - another 16 went public, and one resulted in a partnership (with… Microsoft,of course). The more well known startups read like a Who's Who of the Web industry: Four11, Hotmail, Navitel, planetU, Tumbleweed, then there are systems oriented enterprises like ALOHA, Aspect, Banyan, Cohesive, Octel,SQA, Upside, Lightwave, Sierra Semiconductor and Qume, and finally Pete's Brewing, whose beers (Pete's Wicked Ale) have made it right across the nation.
Buyers of these startups show clearly where they think corporate research has gone. They include Yahoo (itself recently"acquired"), Microsoft, America Online (another one of those startups that grew humongous without ever making a penny profit), Rational, Time, Inc., ITT, and Mattel. Why invest in research on the basis of marketing forecasts, as we often do, when there are venture capitalists and entrepreneurs out there willing to take the risk for you? That way, you do not have to shell out a penny until a product's technological viability has been proven, and then all you have to do is win a bidding war, which all of us in the Fortune 1000 are pretty good at. Companies are no longer valued on their earnings, after all, these are companies, mostly in the service and support industries, that are valued on their earnings potential. A product now has two success cycles: making it work is one, the other one is selling it, marketing has become a standalone craft.
It is particularly clear from the presence of Pete's Wicked Ale on the list of at Draper Fisher Jurvetson's success stories. Pete's went public, in early 1996, at just under $20 per share, which must have made the investors really happy - currently, it is trading at a little over $4 per share, which is probably a much more reasonable valuation of the company.
I am using this example deliberately, because beer is a consumer product as much as Hotmail is, and consumer products stand and fall with the way they are marketed. People need to be told what they need, as we all know, and as many of us practice on an every day basis. "Hey, you need Netscape!" I've been heard to say, and my poor victim then slinks away and begins a 17 megabyte download. It's a good thing we have the Internet, because you couldn't carry the diskettes if you wanted to. And it is even better that I work for a telephone company, because you are directly connected to my company retirement plan all during the download, if you live in the Northeastern United States. But let's get back to Wicked Ale:
Above the 5 year financial picture for Pete's - as you can see, there is a steady increase in turnover and profitability, as the years progress, and Pete's went public when that made sense, it was stable, it was time for the venture capitalists to claw some money back.
When we look at who owns the place, we can see that Pete's, apart from holdings by the people who started it, has two capital investment funds, and a brewery as owners:
| STROH BREWINGCO | 9.66% | (PRX 04-11-97) |
| SORTWELL CHRISTOPHERT. | 9.66% | (PRX 04-11-97) |
| DDJ CAPITALMANAGEMENT | 8.46% | (PRX 04-11-97) |
| MACLEAN AUDREY | 7.95% | (PRX 04-11-97) |
| O'ROURKEINVESTMENT CORP | 7.12% | (PRX 04-11-97) |
| BOZZINI MARKF. | 6.63% | (PRX 04-11-97) |
| SLOSBERG PETES. | 5.61% | (PRX 04-11-97) |
| FMR CORP | 5.24% | (PRX 04-11-97) |
So what can we glean from the Pete's story? First of all, my bet would be that a large brewery (Stroh's ?) will buy the brand by the time it gets really successful, or when it needs a branded brew. (This reminds me of another beer story, that of Killian's Red - an Irish beer, right? Wrong! It was a French brewery, in need of a new beer brand, that purchased a defunct, but branded, Irish brewery, put an ale together, and that ale is now sold in Irish pubs the world over, with the French laughing all the way to the bank.)
At any rate, there is little that distinguishes selling beer from selling technology - if you can sell French beer to an Irishman as Irish, you can sell "free" email to a network subscriber. After all, Microsoft (I promised we'd get back to Mr. Gates) has its own Internetwork, and as such, it is now able to offer a form of email to its subscribers that will require them to stay on line longer than they had intended to. Best thing since sliced bread. And that is, perforce, the lesson we researchers need to learn, and understand, when we are looking for funding for our projects: unless we have one of those marketing types on board, someone who really knows how to convince a prospect that this is just the thing, somebody who also knows how to talk to finance people (these are the guys that love having lunch with you, only to go back to their bosses to report you're not really focused), you may get your research started, but it won't go anywhere. The days of open-ended funding are over.
Mind you, there's an upside to that comment - the days of endless funding are here!
Look at AOL, or any of a dozen other upstarts. AOL is a company that set up shop, grew at a phenomenal rate, used that growth rate to convince financiers it need more capital, used that capital to buy other companies, used the cost of growing those acquisitions to convince the financiers it was growing so fast it really did need more investment capital, and its latest coup was a brilliant one:
It bought CompuServe from Worldcom, in the process trading its network backbone (in our trade, that's the only thing you really make money on) and the CompuServe backbone for CompuServe's subscriber base (and its systems, but computer systems are written off in a matter of years, these days). So, while America Online looks like a very large ISP, it isn't. It's Worldcom that is the ISP - all it has to do is play the wholesaler, maintain an access network, and it gets to send out one bill, at the end of the month - instead of ten million bills, like AOL / CompuServe does. Ever try that, sending out ten million charges? I personally think Worldcom got the better part of the deal…
So perhaps life did get easier, for us researchers, and those of us that complain about there no longer being real research facilities should take another look. We really can't even say we weren't warned, we've all dreamed about being Jobs and Wozniak, but I would suggest that these two, and so many others, weren't entrepreneurs, they were researchers that eventually turned into businessmen. And perhaps that was an early reminder of the way the world is going - invent something, see if you can find people that are willing to use it (the Web is neat, stuff is free, mostly!), then show the world that you invented something that could sell. I have yet to see the last step taken - perhaps we, the telephone companies, should invest tons of money into all these new services that make people spend hours and hours using their telephones, we are not yet doing that. Fund them, and let them do their thing, because they do provide us with large amounts of revenues - revenues that go away when they go away.
And by that time, we will have come full circle - we may not be funding research in-house, but it really doesn't matter where those research dollars go. They help increase profitability, and that has to, in the final analysis, be the name of the game.
So, if you're young, or even if you're not, but want to change careers, and you'd like to go into any kind of development, learn to use the two most important research tools of all:
and you'll be just fine - provided, of course, you don't forget to put your resume on the Web, I get three hits a day….
Some of the examples, above, do go across cultures, ethnicities, and continents. One of the questions I was asked, before writing this, is to provide some indication of the differences I perceive, in the way commercial research is done, in Europe and the USA.
I used to have very strong opinions on this, way back when I first came to this country, but they're not as strong today. To some extent, Europe has changed a great deal, as progress in the implementation of the European Union breaks down ethnic and linguistic banners. The fall of communism in the Eastern bloc has also had an effect on the way Europeans do business, never before had so large a market opened up, all in one fell swoop.
Because the overriding factor in the way things are done, here in the USA, is that we have one vast and affluent market, which uses a single unified language. I have often said that one of the reason I moved to the USA is that I personally prefer being a small cog in a large wheel, over being a large cog in a small wheel. This doesn't mean to say that I have ever felt Holland was too small, but I thrive on challenge, and as far as that is concerned, you couldn't be in a better place than the USA. That may have changed, in the past decade, I was on the implementation team that set up our GSM mobile telephony joint venture in Indonesia, and the one overriding impression I brought back from that assignment was that if anywhere is exploding, it is the Far East. I had never seen competition like I saw it in Indonesia, anywhere.
And it is clear that Europe, in terms of competitive thinking, is re-inventing the wheel, and doing so successfully. No American in their right mind would have ever conceived of giving away free telephone service, as it is now done in several European countries. It is a logical next step, one that we never took. Dutch PTT's endeavour to provide free voicemail to all of its subscribers, as a way of upping the ante for its impending competitors, is another good example of the way in which Europeans are aggressively moving ahead in the brave new world of co-opetition.
That's what it's been called, here in the US: co-opetition. A world in which you compete, but also have to work together, to make and retain profits.
There is otherwise not that much difference, between the Old and the New world. It continues to be easier, in the US, to "set upshop", the American legal - and tax system favours the entrepreneur, you can get permits for just about anything, just by forking over some money, and the tax man is very generous in letting you write off just about anything you need, to try and set up a venture. It's OK to fail, too, and to write off your losses.
In Europe, rules and regulations are much stricter, and I sometimes feel you get penalized for striking out on your own - it was that way, at least, when I was living in Europe. I was at the receiving end of that, while still trying to set up my own shop, in Amsterdam, and later, London. It wasn't until I was looking for serious venture capital, and was told, by Price Waterhouse in London, that that would take one to two years, that I realized I was in the wrong place - and yes, I do realize things have changed, even in England. My accountant in Miami laughed,when he heard that, and said: "Why don't you move here? We do that in amonth". I received my Green Card a scant four months later.
Yet when I look at the competition we experience from Europeans in South East Asia, it's clear they are no different from us, it's just that the large European corporations have facilities that the small ones don't. It can be done, there are small startups all over Europe, and have been for years. Yet, somehow, the culture in the US is more encouraging to people wanting to strike out on their own - my setting up a small company in the US took all of an afternoon, where doing the same in Holland and England had taken months, and tons of money you do not have, when you're small and hungry, all you have is ideas.
On assignment in Monaco, I heard from many people that the tax breaks promised by the French government to startup companies in the Sophia Antipolis enterprise zone near Nice didn't really exist. At the same time, it was clear those people weren't really doing their homework - those breaks did exist right next door, in Monaco, albeit only if you weren't a French citizen. So the real difference is perhaps more to do with how good you are at "out of the box" thinking, than with the existing environment. And it is clear that Europe, in its new format, is rapidly catching up with us in the US, if it hasn't already passed us by. Our main competitors, in Indonesia, in the GSM environment, are Dutch KPN and German Telekom, the preferred system, GSM, is itself European, and 80% of the vendors that we buy the implementation equipment from, the vendors that won the bidding, are European too. When we set up shop, there was only one switch manufacturer that had a complete switch sitting at the port, ready for installation - and that manufacturer is European. Faced with a largely stagnant market at home, we have no option but to go overseas and compete in other people's backyards, and that competition is pretty fierce, and getting fiercer.
So, today, much of the cultural difference is evaporating. That's a good thing - one thing I have learned, in the US, is that you cannot make the products you invent profitable, in the long term, unless you have a very large market. Your employees are more expensive today than they have ever been, the cost of litigation is rocketing skyward, the cost of licenses, in the various countries you do business in, is enormous, so what we used to call niche markets are ever in decline, and if you have an idea for a new product or service, there is, today, no way you can get that "out there" unless you go across borders. I was involved with the small Dutch company that was originally licensed to import Apple ][ computers into the Benelux - eventually, a larger company moved in, and eventually, Apple set up its own subsidiary - piggybacking on someone else's invention is clearly not a good idea. Yet buried in a small town in the South of the Netherlands is a slew of small startup companies, financed by a Dutch venture capitalist, and all doing very well, thank you very much, and they know how to do business. When I originally wanted to buy their disk mirroring software, I ended up with their subsidiary in Shreveport, Louisiana, never even knowing the company was Dutch until much later. That's good, in the US, Americans don't like buying stuff that needs support from foreigners.
So our world is changing, and we should change with it. For the up and coming generation, this'll all be second nature, but it is us "old hands" that have to rethink the way we do business, we have to stop consolidating our positions, and go out there to find the fine thinkers that are building their dreams in small towns in the South of the country. They're there, all you need to do is find them.
Bell Atlantic home - Menno Aartsen home