langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2002-08-02

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Freitag, 2. August 2002

Michael Saylor: "Years have gone by, and now we're seeing our customers have leap-frogged up. They've actually taken the software and they've actually built these applications, and they've taken them to a degree that we actually hadn't contemplated before. That's a much more stable configuration. If you are evangelizing your vision, it's a religion. But when your customer has already embraced the vision and they've one-upped you, and they're just asking you to provide them with infrastructure to realize the vision, that's a business." — Ergo: From a business viewpoint, visions suck.

"I would say that as a lesson learned, it's in the best interests of any entrepreneur to try to keep their business model as simple as possible, and try to keep their accounting as simple as possible. The more complicated your business gets, the more you rely upon the advice of expert accountants and lawyers, and the less you're in the business of being a technology entrepreneur, and the more you're in the business of being a financier."

2002-08-02-mStrategy

WinForms - The FAQ.

2002-08-02-winFormFAQ

David Ness 7936 days AGO
I find it a little hard to separate the message from the messenger in this case. Saylor has managed to run his $300/sh company down to $0.50 or so, so apparently he may not be a real expert on `the vision thing'. Indeed, apparently his `vision' is bad enough that he didn't quite notice all those little funny entries that managed to make it into the account books of his company.

Even the article pointed at is incredible hype. If I read it correctly it is current (3 Aug) and lists the `value' of Saylor's company at around $150m. The `market' lists it (as of today) at about $40m. So I guess it's proof that there's still `Hype in them thar hills...'

This dosen't prove that what he says here is ignorant. But then, it doesn't make it more credible either...

earl 7936 days AGO
The article was published in the June issue - most likely it was written in the end of April.

chris 7936 days AGO
I have quite a problem with phrases like "managed to run his $300/sh company down to $0.50", as they're IMO extremely misrepresenting. I don't think it was due to Mr Saylor's exceptional management talent that the stock went up to $300 in the first place, so it's a little hard to blame the downfall on him or the management team (the company itself is by any accounts not performing worse than at the time of the $300 stock high). If anything is to blame for "dramas" like that, then it's collective irrationality and unproportional amounts of greed shown by about everyone involved in the bubble economy (who would claim that s/he had any trust in the investments as such back then, as opposed to the obviously wide-spread - and, in retrospect, quite fallible - belief that there must be even dumber gregarious animals out there). On that note, I doubt that the stock market has too much to do with real performance of companies (which seems to become harder to evaluate every day anyway). Traders could as well bet on horses, what difference would it make? At least everyone could finally acknowledge the amount of sheer luck (or randomness) involved in the game then.

Of course it might be a bit harder to sell people pension plans based on the predicted performance of War Emblem.

David Ness 7936 days AGO
Thanks for the information. It raises two follow-up questions. One is on `dating' articles. AFAICS the only date I am seeing must be `today' and must be automatically generated. I can't find anyplace obvious that tells me anything about when an article was written. In a field as volitale as ours is, something even a few months old, might as well have been written in a previous millenium (when Saylor was worth $15billion or so). `Good Press' sources should be careful to `date' the articles.

The second point is that your `dating' the article helps me understand just how bad the journalists are in this field. Apparently this was written a quarter or so ago, and the journalists bought the `we;re back on track' spiel wholesale. Since that time the Market Cap has apparently been cut to
1/4 of what it was, and they are now engineering a `reverse split' to keep the stock from being delisted.

Anyway, thanks for the information. It adds to `the story'.

chris 7936 days AGO
I find the lack of "reliable dating" rather distressful as well. Worse, to whom is it of use to show "3 AUG 2002" as the only date on the page? To people resetting their clock?

David Ness 7936 days AGO
To Chris' point: I would have more sympathy for your point of view if people like Mr. Saylor had devoted considerable time and energy to explaining how overvalued his stock was as it went up. And if he had installed proper and sensible accounting procedures and policies that prevented the booking of `profits' that were principally composed of `vapor' with the object of hyping that very stock price that you claim was not a part of his `exceptional management talent.' For the most part, they didn't bother---apparently being happy instead to `ride the wave'. IMO, if you choose to `ride the wave' you can't gripe if someone then blames you for crashing on the beach.

I must confess to not know the specific details of Mr. Saylor's performance, but I did have direct experience with some similar `smoke and mirror' companies that had stock prices in the multiple hundreds of dollars that now trade for multiple dimes. Much of the time the executives were too busy arguing about the decor of the Corporate Jets, arranging their purchases of `foreign' properties (vineyards were the vogue, at least for a while) and trading in their BMWs for Lamborghinis to devote much attention to developing sustainable sources of revenue for their companies. In the cases I know directly the managers are a peculiar and generally talentless lot, largely posessing skills that would have had them sell snake-oil if they had been born a century earlier.

The general point is that a performance like Mr. Saylor's surely does not add any _weight_ to his philosophy. At best, his history is such that if he were to write under a pseudonym and claim _no_ past history, then his ideas would stand or fall on their own merit. As it is, if he wants to have his past performance add `weight' to his words, then he _must_ be content to accept the _whole_ weight. If I understand your (Chris') argument correctly, then this guy is essentially someone who won a Stock Price Lottery, and I don't think I have much interest in taking systems advice or direction from lottery winners as a group.

So for me, either he was _not_ responsible for what happened, and therefore just another rrandom lottery winner, or he _was_ responsible for what happened, and it wasn't very pretty. In either case his history doesn't add much weight to his argument...

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