We need solutions to industry 'bugs,' not critics
Stuart Cohen made news by declaring that the open-source business model is broken (when, in fact, it's not: just one particular, outdated and out-moded model is).
Now Alan Frazier, a prominent venture capitalist, is declaring that the venture capital model is broken.
Meanwhile, pundits are also declaring that the auto industry is broken (It is.), the finance industry is broken, the housing market is broken, health care is broken, and so on.
Have you caught the chorus yet? "Everything is broken" is how it goes.
Easy words when the world appears to be falling apart. But we don't need people who can tell us what is broken. Everyone can see that things have gone fundamentally awry.
Instead, we need people who can tell us how to fix problems. Finding "bugs" in the system is relatively easy. Fixing them? Well, that requires a bit more effort.
Tim O'Reilly is a fixer, routinely, accurately predicting the future. We need more Tims, and fewer myopic critics.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/04/bad-behavior-about-bad-behavior.html
Give me a break! Matt, I would have assumed that, as a manager, you appreciated the difference between a "bug" and a systemic problem. Being able to recognize and describe a systemic problem (rather than rattle off a litany of symptoms, which is basically what your post did) can get you half-way (if not further) to a solution. It is sort of like recognizing that you are an addict before you can recover from your addiction. If you read more comprehensive sources than the IT press, you might know that cooler heads actually ARE taking such a systemic approach:
http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/11/no-bretton-woods.html
Unfortunately, there are too many folks who are part of the problem (as we used to say in the Sixties) who are not interested in their making any progress!
What I want to hear is something like: Hello, my name is (insert CEO name here) and I'm hooked on making large gas guzzling vehicles that nobody wants to buy any more.
There's a lot that is wrong with with everything. I feel like we've had a 25 year party and we're all over-fed, tired, and passing out drunk on the pool table.
We're getting to the morning-after-the-night-before. Your question is the first one we need to ask after we wake up, for sure. And know that there are a lot of solutions out there for everything that ails us but there will need to be trade-offs because we're broke. What do we fix first?
This is why we need to be brutally honest with ourselves and really focus on the core, the main source or sources of our current dilemma. If we've collectively been spending time pointing to problems, that's okay. There are plenty of places on the internet to find solutions, like mentioned above and I've found blogs like Marketspeak (www.accrongroup.com/wordpress1) to be interesting sites to visit for solution-type thinking.
Also, keep in mind, if you found the grand solution to our biggest problems would you blantantly publish it for everyone to see or gradually roll it out, secretively, at first, for profit?
It's good that we're airing out our problems, right now.
- by MSSlayer December 6, 2008 11:15 AM PST
- The VC model is broken. It is a predatory model that destroys not build companies. It is worse than going public.
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(6 Comments)Any company that cares about growing in a sustainable way and truly cares about what it is creating will avoid both.