I’ve written about this general topic many times over the years and doing a search here and at PBS will yield a great deal that I’d rather not have to repeat. We’ve been here before. Maybe not so much in terms of there being a whistle-blower or a traitor (your choice of terms — I’d say whistle-blower), but these surveillance programs are either old hat or logical extensions of what came before. I’m not defending them, I’m saying we shouldn’t be surprised they exist.

Today’s news was that the U.S. and UK have been snooping on the e-mails and phone conversations of foreign politicians. What news is that? Intelligence agencies have been snooping as long as there have been intelligence agencies. That’s what these agencies were created for in the first place. Just because it’s now Putin, not Khrushchev (or Obama, not Eisenhower) doesn’t change much for agencies that are supposed to be non-political. It’s just another day at the wiretap for these guys.

But it isn’t all non-political, is it? We build these capabilities and then we abuse them, sometimes shamefully. That’s not the way it is supposed to be but it’s the way it is. A huge revelation for me in this Snowden business was in his Q&A yesterday morning with the Guardian in which he explained that the information – all the information being stored – is generally available to analysts who are trusted not to read the bits they aren’t supposed to see.

Yeah, right.

Intelligence agencies and their people will inevitably break these rules because the agents and officials are human, they often have complex personal motivations to do so, and wading through all this information it’s easy to forget the rules or not see them as applying to you. Such rules are intended, after all, to keep other people out.

It’s difficult to reconcile respect for privacy in programs that are inherently designed to violate privacy. We pretend to have it both ways but that doesn’t really work.

What concerns me too is the collateral damage, fear of which you can see in companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft trying to distance themselves from this crisis. The NSA, CIA, DIA – you name the agency – doesn’t care a damn about these companies or their customers. For the agencies, maintaining data integrity is important only for internal – never external – reasons. And for this reason alone they’ll get sloppy.

Here’s the big question I don’t hear being asked: what do these NSA revelations mean for Cloud Computing?

The essence of the cloud is that our stuff is being held for us by someone else just like the kind, friendly, and ever-so-benevolent banks hold our money then refuse to loan it back to us. The rules say they’ll hold our stuff but not read it, right? Well that one is now out the window. May as well just store everything down at the NSA.

Maybe we already do.

So the recent news is bad for the cloud but it’s also bad for the intelligence agencies, themselves, because they’ve been busted. Who benefits from that? The regular military – the ones with guns and missiles – benefits, because when intelligence fails the fallback is to come out blasting.

Some generals in the Pentagon are enjoying this comeuppance immensely.

My prediction is that nothing much will come of this. No laws will be changed and probably no jobs will even be lost. If anything intelligence budgets will go up because – again like the banks – these operations are considered too big to fail.

And so we bail them out of trouble.

Snowden himself is I think the most interesting part of this because he’s a so-called Millennial. His ethics and allegiances are not those of his father or grandfather and certainly not those of the politicians and intelligence leaders he’d love to bring down. So the old rules, old threats, and old reward structures don’t work with this guy, making him even more dangerous.

I think that’s good. In fact I think it’s the system re-regulating itself. We created Edward Snowden by disappointing him so. Our leaders, representing the old culture even as they presented themselves as representing the new, gave him no morally acceptable way to be successful in his own culture. We made him do what he is doing now. And if you think that’s bullshit I suggest you think again because this guy has been very clear about his motivation.

A mighty storm is blowing on Snowden and I don’t think we’ve seen all of it yet.

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Bob Metcalfe said I looked too old to possibly be me. Pot.

Two weeks ago I was at the Computer History Museum to help observe the 40th anniversary of Ethernet. It was literally 40 years to the day since Bob Metcalfe drew his first sketches of what became the world’s dominant OSI Level 2 network technology. It was a fun and festive day that ended, believe it or not, with dancing. But some of the celebration didn’t make sense to me. Or, rather, it seemed to me that important parts of the discussion were missing.

When, for example, did 802.11 WiFi become a part of 802.3 Ethernet? That claim was made over and over during the day and helped power the argument that Ethernet is today a $100 billion business. Yeah, right.

Parts of that argument are true. Certainly Ethernet is dancing on the grave of Arcnet and Token Ring. When Howard Charney of Cisco said that Ethernet accounts for 98 percent of the network interfaces shipping now from Cisco (if you pretend that WiFi is Ethernet) it had a world of meaning for the rise of Metro Ethernet and the decline of DS1 (T-1) and DS3 (T-3) connections — connections that have been Cisco’s profit centers until just now.

So this claim of all-Ethernet, all the time, is a big deal and has vast implications for Cisco’s future business and that of its competitors, but it doesn’t mean Ethernet is now the only game in town.

Cisco has made a fortune on traditional telephone circuits: (DS1 and DS3 interfaces) and CCIEs (Certified Cisco Internetwork Experts — don’t call them engineers) have made a good living keeping those clunky router interfaces running. Yet it hasn’t made sense to me for years that I could get 15+ megabits-per-second for around $30 through my cable or DSL modem when businesses were paying 15 times as much for 1.5-megabit T-1s that offered no scalability and problematic provisioning. That’s what appears to be finally changing and with it will change the required skill sets of CCIEs.

If the new network is really Ethernet end-to-end (LAN-to-WAN) then only a subset of CCIE training will be soon needed, right?

Not so fast.

Here’s another, slightly different, view of where Ethernet is going thanks to discussions with friends and CCIE’s like my friend George Morton who are living in those network trenches. Where one of the themes of the Museum event for example, seemed to be SONet is dead, it might be just as correct to say SONET is Ethernet.

I know, Mr. Smartypants, that SONET is Layer 1 while Ethernet is Layer 2, but Bob Metcalfe, himself, spoke at the event of Ethernet as a “SONET-killer,” yet I don’t see SONET disappearing soon where fiber is already installed.

What really stands in the way of Metro Ethernet are DOCSIS 3.0, (170Mbps/110Mbps) and 3.1, (10Gbps/2.5Gbps) — data technologies from your cable company.

The network in the next few years will see further LAN migration away from Ethernet toward WiFi with the NSA wireless security Suite-B and the new 1.3Gbps 802.11ac and ae WiFi protocols.  The best way to think about this transition is there’s no way to easily do wired Ethernet with mobile devices so as the client mix changes, WiFi will naturally come to dominate.

From an operational cost perspective why pay cable costs of $100 to $200 for each copper Ethernet port, then buy a switch for each very expensive copper cable?

Cisco sees this change and as a result recently bought Meraki for cloud management of WiFi services.

You can see this trend toward wireless already with the number of WiFi-only products that connect to the LAN in your home like those cheaper Roku boxes that don’t even include an RJ45 port.

So here’s the real state of Ethernet at 40:

Data Center networking will be 10/40/100GbE.

The Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) will be Ethernet over Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS — a combination of Layer 2 and 3 technologies) or Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) which is layer 2 — essentially wide area Ethernet. But the Layer 1 protocols will be SONET, and DOCSIS, with DOCSIS eventually winning because of lower cost of deployment, (cable is cheaper to deploy versus fiber to the building).

The way DOCSIS wins for MAN and WAN access is because of lower cost. Here are some numbers from my own recent network shopping trip:

Service                                      Monthly Rate

DS1 with MPLS and router               $550

DS3 with MPLS and router               $2,250

DOCSIS Private MAN 2Mbps:         $310

DOCSIS Private MAN 50Mbps:      $1,265

These DOCSIS services, by the way, were both Comcast Business Class Ethernet Network Service Premium with latency guaranteed less than 12ms, jitter less than 2ms, and packet loss less than 0.001 percent.

The market supremacy of Ethernet in the WAN and MAN, then, is not so much about the protocol but about operating costs. Looking at it another way, it’s all just marketing.

Even Metro-Ethernet ISPs have a hard time matching DOCSIS prices because of the cost of build-out.  Telephone companies never intended fiber to be in the local loop, only twisted pair.  Ethernet will shift from the LAN protocol to become the MAN/WAN protocol for edge delivery.

Who is going to deliver the bits is the question and in the end price will determine that. Remember ATM? It wasn’t bad, just too expensive.

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We men spend our lives alternately emulating our fathers and rebelling against them, a process I was surprised to see lasts long after death. They give us their faces: certainly you can see a lot of him in me, though his face is mooshed a bit from landing a plane in the roof of a barn. I’ve so far avoided that fate.

The girl next to him is my mother, 66 in that photo and 89 today. She still lives in the same house and for 20 years drove the same car. They had a great love and I try to emulate that, too, but not rebel.

My father taught my mother how to cook. She was a southern girl who grew up thinking the kitchen was a room you passed through on the way to the back door. I suppose they more properly learned to cook together because his own cooking knowledge was mainly theoretical, gained primarily from a winter in World War II spent sharing a tent in China with another soldier who had been a sous chef at the New Yorker Hotel before the war. They spent three months talking only of food.

My father was a character. He was expelled from high school by a principal who was his aunt. So my having been fired three times by Steve Jobs should not have been a surprise. 

My father ran a labor union, one of the construction trades, and while he may have had enemies I never knew that when I was growing up because he treated everyone the same. His members loved him and he created for them many programs that survive today — health insurance, pensions, and training programs that simply didn’t exist before for what were essentially itinerant workers.

And at least once my father probably saved lives. Early in his career there was a time of unrest when criminals were trying to force their way into the construction industry. The local godfather, Mr. Minetti, had a Christmas party to which he invited all his friends and enemies. A highlight of this party — at least for Mr. Minetti — was when he’d challenge the room to a contest eating hot Italian peppers. A few would stand against him, eat a pepper or two and retire. But that year my father stood against Mr. Minetti and won. The symbolism was lost on nobody, the war stopped, and my father was MISTER Cringely from then on.

We stand for something in life or we don’t and my father did. I wish I was even more like him.

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The process of switching I, Cringely from Media Temple to WP Engine, which was supposed to take a few hours, ended up taking more than a week!

Poor Jennie had to do the hard work, schlepping over thousands of files from a server that continually crashed. There may be an easier way to do it but we don’t know that way. Then WP Engine ran a security upgrade in the middle of our transition, freezing us out of the system because we were neither here nor there. My nemesis CloudFlare didn’t want to give up the DNS and when we finally got it switched it for some reason took two days to propagate.

But enough of this complaining: sometimes these things are just what you have to endure.

Of course it happened right in the middle of one of the busiest technology news weeks in a long time so I have a lot of catching-up to do. Over the next 2-3 days you can expect posts on the future of Ethernet, layoffs at IBM, the NSA of course, and even Apple’s WWDC.

It’s good to be back.

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When I left PBS at the end of 2008, Media Temple was state of the art, but that was then. After five years on essentially the same server platform with only a couple memory increases along the way, things were getting a little brittle as many of you have noticed. The hardware is old, some of the software is no longer even being supported, as such downtime has increased and from time to time my digital slip has been showing.

There are now specialist outfits like WPEngine devoted solely to WordPress blogs like this one. It’s more expensive but they also do more. And of course as a new customer my blog will be loaded on their newest equipment, so it can’t help but be faster.

If I’m going to fault Media Temple it’s for bad communication. They were apparently planning a big hardware upgrade but didn’t bother to tell me until I said I was leaving. My last two support tickets remain open and unanswered. No hard feelings, but it will be a relief to go… I hope.

A new host is like a new girlfriend or wife. Everything I’ve heard about WP Engine is good. Now I can just hope it’s all true.

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Or did it? Each year in the USA the Centers for Disease Control estimates that there are approximately 1.7 million so-called Hospital Acquired Infections (infections that wouldn’t have happened had the victim not been in the hospital) leading to approximately 100,000 deaths.

One hundred thousand deaths is a lot of deaths, especially if every one was avoidable. If you look at morbidity and mortality statistics for the USA you’ll see that very few causes of death have greater than 100,000 annual victims. Heart disease, cancer, accidents, and strokes are all over 100,000 annual deaths, as are chronic respiratory infections, but many of those latter are actually hospital acquired.

Hospitals are not a very good place to be sick, it seems.

We spend a lot of time bitching about the cost of medical care in this country but not enough time, it seems, demanding that our hospitals be cleaner.

Wait a minute! What about the semiconductor industry, couldn’t their clean room technology help make hospitals less dangerous? Maybe… if anyone would bother to try.

This topic came up in a discussion I had recently with an old friend who designs (actually, used to design) clean rooms for high tech companies. He was calling to talk about my stinky Jeep I wrote about last week:

Ozone is interesting stuff.  We used it as a biocide in our ultra pure RO-DI water.  We’d inject Ozone, then run the water through UV-C light.  Between the Ozone and the UV we’d zap every bug in the water.  Ozone is a good biocide.  UV-C is a good biocide.  Combine them and you have an awesome biocide.

I’ve been appalled by the rampant infections in hospitals.  Using UV-C it is easy to disinfect the air in the HVAC system and make it bug free.  With the right tools a hospital room can be sterilized between patients.  Using something like the tool professional carpet cleaners use one can soak, clean, and dry every surface of the room with Ozonated water.  I’d then roll in a UV-C light, seal the room, and zap it for an hour or so. 

As you know I used to design electronic clean rooms.  One of my last projects was to design a pharmaceutical clean room.  The differences between the two were interesting and the influence of government was obvious.  In the pharmaceutical industry they didn’t care about particles in the air, they wanted the room to be able to be sterilized.  Some of those particles are bugs.  Electronic filtration was so good it could remove the bugs in the air.  Bugs will accumulate in your filters.  If you zap the air before it gets to the final filters it will greatly reduce the number of bugs and finding colonies of them in your filters will be rare.  The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t worry about eliminating the bugs.  Their plan is to be able to kill them when there is a problem.

Hospitals follow the same mindset and have generally believed they can deal with most problems by cleaning and sterilizing after the fact.  The circulating air and every person that enters a patient’s room is introducing contamination.  Once you understand the full implications of this, you can make hospitals MUCH cleaner and safer.

Many years ago my mother-in-law had surgery and wound up with a nasty infection that kept her in the hospital for months.  It was a nightmare.  As you entered the ward the smell would hit you.  The rooms were not clean.  The patients were not clean.  The HVAC was not very good and the odors would linger.  If the odors can linger, so can the germs. 

The hospital building was designed and built in the 1960′s.  Back then HVAC designs had low air circulation.  In office buildings this led to what was known as “sick office syndrome.”  It is easy to imagine what can happen in a hospital setting.

I came up with some innovations in the clean room.  The first was to isolate the people (the dirty stuff) from the product (the things you were trying to keep clean).  With good layouts and by isolating the airspace I could turn a low grade clean room into a top performer.  (I could get better than class 10 conditions around the product in a class 10,000 clean room!)  I found ways to take the people out of the clean room and make it a much smaller product only room.  I reduced the size of one room by 90%.  (A 90% reduction in clean room space is a huge savings in money!)

Given this, one could improve on the design of a patient’s room and make it a lot cleaner.  How much room does the patient really need?  He/she needs space for a bed and toilet.  Given that, one could design a super clean zone for the patient.  Does all the equipment and the hospital staff that tends to the equipment need to be in the same air space as the patient?  When you start going through the process of re-examining old assumptions and practices, very obvious design improvements present themselves.  

Okay, it’s Bob again: you thought I had left, didn’t you?

What astounds me about all this are the 1.7 million Hospital Acquired Infections and 100,000 deaths that could have been avoided. We all have to die sometime, but not this week.

Think of the cost to society. Those 1.7 million infections surely add $10,000 each to the hospital bill. That’s $17 billion. What’s the economic value of those 100,000 deaths, say $1 million apiece? That’s another $100 billion for a total of $117 billion per year, every year.

Why don’t we learn from Intel and AMD and make our hospitals safer for patients?

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You can’t.

I should have known. The price was too low, the pictures too good, but the seller had sold hundreds of cars online and boasted a 100 percent satisfaction rating. So did I, but my 82 transactions had taken 13 years to accumulate.

When the car arrived it looked great but it smalled like a thousand mice had been camping in the back. No make that 2000 mice. The seller maintained that it smelled great when they put it on the truck headed west. “We treated it with the ozone machine just to be sure,” he said. That meant nothing to me at the time but it means plenty to me now.

Ozone is used to treat intense odors in vehicles and homes. A $1000 ozone machine and fresh sheets can turn a smoking hotel room into a non-smoking room in an hour. Use a big enough ozone machine and use it long enough and it can kill outright things like mold, mildew and bacteria. But you don’t use an ozone machine without a reason which told me the seller probably knew the car was stinky and hoped ozone would do the job.

I know now that ozone will take a away the mouse smell until the next warm day. So will wintergreen oil, by the way (mice hate wintergreen oil — us it to repel them). So will Oust Extra Strength. But once the sun comes out and the car gets warm, the mice inevitably reassert their will. Two thousand mice will not be denied. No, make that 3000.

I got nowhere with the seller. Yes, we both had 100 percent ratings at risk but he was the sales professional and I wasn’t. He chewed me up and I was on my own. In this case Mutual Assured Destruction of 100 percent ratings worked to his advantage. Keep that in mind for the future: all is not always as it seems.

It would be great if there was a technical way to get around this problem, to add some olfactory component to the original ad. I’d want a 1-10 rating for odor. And it turns out there is technology for this with people actually building electronic noses. But they are even more expensive than ozone machines and can temporarily be fooled by the latter.

The only real answer was to remove the seats and replace the carpet and padding — a thankless job that I farmed out to a local car upholstery guy who charged me several hundred dollars, making the Red Devil less of a bargain and more of a devil than I’d hoped for.

There are times when buying things on the Internet isn’t the best way to go no matter how low the price.

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This is a fascinating bit of history because we aren’t talking about today’s General Motors or even today’s United States of America but the GM and the USA of 1953 — a time when both were leading the world. Yet look at the equivocation in Charlie’s statement — I thought, not I think.

Look, too, at our biggest companies today like Apple, Exxon-Mobil, Google, Microsoft, General Electric, and even, yes, General Motors. Can we still maintain, as Engine Charlie kinda/sorta did, that what’s good for those companies is good for America and vice versa?”

No, we can’t.

A tax policy that has companies diverting revenue to other countries with lower taxes and then holding trillions in cash offshore to further avoid taxes may be good for the companies, but it isn’t good for America.

An immigration policy based on lying about shortages of technical talent in order to reduce real wages and longer-term costs is good for the companies but it isn’t good for America.

That’s what’s happening right now with S.744, a bad bill that will give a green card to every foreign STEM student receiving a master’s degree or higher — this at a time when less than 50 percent of U.S.-born STEM graduates are finding employment in their fields of study.

And sometimes what happens isn’t good for the companies or America. This latter point requires some elaboration.

Again, let’s stick with General Motors. The popular management mantra for nearly every public company, including GM, is that management should “increase shareholder value.” The main point, indeed the only point, we’re told, of running a public company is to make the stock price go up. Anything that doesn’t contribute to increased earnings, which are supposed to translate into higher stock prices, isn’t worth doing. And so pension plans are looted and communities abandoned without a second thought.

Yet following the financial meltdown of 2008, General Motors went bankrupt, was eventually saved after a fashion by a government bailout, and what became of shareholder value? It disappeared completely, those shareholders who hung on losing everything as the value of GM shares went to zero and the company was delisted from trading. Shareholders, those very folk whose value was above all supposed to have been increased, lost everything.

So while the function of the public corporation is supposed to be increasing shareholder value, there are evidently other underlying values that are even greater. In the case of General Motors circa 2009, that greater value lay in continuing to service the company’s debt while also rewarding GM management.

What was ultimately protected in 2009 were the banks and the executives and not much else. Despite the vaunted firing of GM CEO Rick Wagoner after his mistake of flying in a company jet to Washington, DC and not driving, Wagoner still walked away with a package worth $10 million. If that doesn’t sound like much retirement money for a titan of industry remember that during Wagoner’s tenure as CEO GM had a cumulative operating loss of $85 billion.

Rick Wagoner, who came up at GM through the Chief Financial Officer’s office, remember, lost approximately $30 million for GM every day he was CEO.

And the guy was CEO for nine years.

Now you may wonder why I’m on this particular rant and why General Motors seems to be in the middle of it? GM is in this case the poster child for a greater American malaise that I have been worrying about, which I’d characterize as the looting of America.

It’s not a question of whether America’s best days are past or can it’s greatness be regained, the problem with America is the people who think they are in charge have simply given up. Worse still, they appear to be too stupid to even know that’s what they’ve done.

The political wrangling between national parties today reminds me of action heroes and villains (it doesn’t matter who is who in this case) fighting atop a moving train. No matter who wins the fight the train is still moving and as long as the fight continues the train will never stop.

What if in all this wrestling the train is going somewhere really terrible but the combatants, trapped in traditional enmity compounded by new-fangled grudges and excuses, don’t even know it? That’s how Washington feels today.

The parasites believe they are in control of the host. The liars, cheaters, bullies, con artists, misguided ideologues and former student council presidents who have been fighting for control of this nation since the 1960s have now thrown away enough treasure and eaten enough seed corn that we as a nation are nearing a tipping point. We may well be past that tipping point. And the way our leaders behave, they assume we are past it.

Look at the later days of any empire. There’s still wealth and grandeur, but there’s also corruption. The court becomes interested more in intrigue than substance not because intrigue is more fun but because substance is viewed as being out of reach.

That’s the way it seems today in our government and most others, where we spend a lot of time arguing and very little time actually getting things done. Debts rise and money is thrown away for what? Our leaders have forgotten what cooperation and communication are even for.

Which brings us back to Charles Wilson, who as Secretary of Defense trying to downsize the military-industrial complex after the Korean War said, “the price of progress is trouble, and I must be making lots of progress.”

Where are you, Engine Charlie? We need you.

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I am an ambitious boy who likes to code Java.

I wonder how to code Mojang applications.

I hear water splashing on the seashore.

I see happiness in the air.

I want superpowers.

I am an ambitious boy who likes to code Java.

I pretend I am flying on the swing.

I feel scared of bridges.

I touch the center of the Earth.

I worry about earthquakes.

I cry when I get insulted.

I am an ambitious boy who likes to code Java.

I understand the meaning of life.

I say Bigfoot is real.

I dream about living in Lala Land.

I try to help as much as I can.

I hope to have lots of gummies.

I am an ambitious boy who likes to code Java.

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His company will exit almost before it enters. This is happening a lot lately and we generally think it is a good thing but it’s not.

If, like me, you spend a lot of time around startups you know that one of the standard questions asked of founders is “what’s your exit strategy?” An exit is a so-called liquidity event — a transaction of some sort that turns company equity into spendable cash often making someone (hopefully the founders) rich enough for their children to have something to fight over.

Typical exits are Initial Public Offerings of shares or acquisitions — one company being bought by another. But this whole scenario isn’t exactly as it appears, because the person typically asking the exit question is an investor or a prospective investor and what he or she really wants to know is “what’s my exit strategy?”

How are you going to make me rich if I choose to invest in your company?

Were it not for demanding investors the exit question would be asked less often because it isn’t even an issue with many company founders who are already doing what they like and presumably making a good living at it.

What’s Larry Ellison‘s exit strategy?

Larry doesn’t have one.

Neither did Steve Jobs, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, or a thousand other company founders whose names don’t happen to be household words.

What’s Michael Dell’s exit strategy? Dell, who is trying to take his namesake company private — to de-exit — wants to climb back inside his corporate womb.

There was a time not long ago when exits happened primarily to appease early investors. The company would go public, money would change hands, but the same people who founded the company would still be running it. That’s how most of the name Silicon Valley firms came to be.

Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com has no exit strategy. Neither does Reed Hastings of NetFlix. You know Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com has no exit strategy.

But what about Jack Dorsey of Twitter or even Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook? I wonder about those companies. They just don’t have a sense of permanence to me.

And what about Bill Gates? In Accidental Empires I wrote that Bill wasn’t going anywhere, that running Microsoft was his life’s work. Yet he’s given up his corporate positions and moved on to philanthropy for the most part, despite this week’s effort to shore-up his fading fortune by claiming that iPad users are “frustrated.”

Yeah, right.

Bill Gates didn’t have an exit strategy until running Microsoft stopped being fun so he found an exit. And I think the same can be said for any of these name founders, that they wanted to stay on the job as long as it remained fun.

But the new paradigm — the Instagram paradigm (zero to a billion in 12 months or less) — is different. This paradigm says that speed is everything and there is no permanence in business. It’s a paradigm pushed by earnings-crazed Wall Street analysts and non-founder public company CEOs who each work an average of four years before pulling their golden ripcords. In high tech this has led to startups being seen as bricks with which big companies are made bigger.

Sometimes thee bricks are made of technology, sometimes they are made simply of people.

Build or buy? The answer, whenever possible, is now buy-buy-buy because even if the cost of buying is higher the outcome seems to be more assured. My buddy with his startup has solved a problem being faced by other companies, really big companies, so it’s probably easier for one of those to buy his startup than to solve the problem themselves.

And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this except it leads to a lot of people being where they aren’t really happy, working off multi-year pay-outs just counting the days until they can get out of the acquiring company that made them rich.

Even those who embrace the quick-and-dirty ethos of almost instant exits seem to do so  because they don’t know better. “What’s your exit strategy?” they’ve been asked a thousand times, so they not only have one, their papier-mâché startups are designed from the start with that exit in mind whether it’s the right thing to do or not.

I think this is sad and — even worse — I think it is leading to a lot of wasted talent. It cheats us of chances for greatness.

I wish more companies had no exit strategies at all.

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