Corporate Digital Uptake: where does it end?
We read daily of small entrepreneurial companies being gobbled up by Big-COs in an effort to line their lairs with the necessary accouterments of technology they don’t have the talent or time to develop. And as well, in many cases the small-cos are gobbled just for the sake of gobbling or to keep competition from ‘feeding’.
Regardless of whom it is doing the ‘gobbling’ or who gets ‘gobbled’, ‘gobbling’ is not good. Gobbling causes a retardation in new development.
How does it do that you ask?
Simple. Big-CO’s are about making money for the bottom-line. Start-ups are all about exploring new ideas and bringing the first generation of new products to the world of consumers. The two are not compatible; in status and in purpose. But the Big-COs continue to believe they cannot survive without either owner or stopping competition from owning the goods of the little-cos. And the little-cos think they must become part of the Big-COs in order to have the capital to bring their next-Big-Thing to market.
Unfortunately, what both don’t seem to realize is:
- The BigCO is too big and too busy worrying about ‘bottom-line’ to mess with the development of a bunch of newly absorbed little-co remnants!
- The little-cos realize, far too late, that they are on-their-own and in short supply of funding dollars.
Oh, what a viscious cycle. Why doesn’t someone step in an stop it?
The reason is quite easy, most folks who could… know it’s no use. They realize they could loose their heads in the ‘reaction’ from the attempted rescuse with no effective positive outcome. Eveyone would loose.
It is just not seen as worth it.
Yet, all the while the entrepreneurial bloodline is loosing its seedstock of truly great business building minds.
This bit of news just came across the wires a while back.
“HEEDING THE NEED FOR ENDLESS innovation, Fox Interactive Media plans to pad MySpace and its other Web properties with two technology companies strong on consumer-generated–as well as edited, mashed up, and shared–media. ” by Gavin O’Malley, Thursday, May 31, 2007 6:00 AM ET Online Media Daily
Where does it end?
That is a good… and timely… question as yet another piece of news came across my wire this afternoon and nearly every afternoon of another small company being gobbled up in the rush of the ‘power-driven-BigCos’ to have it all. And in the fray, the one thing that is so vital to the future of technology gets squashed: innovation.
These startling bits of information give us a startling glimpse of an even more startling sign that in their haste to make big corporate payoffs, some of the best technology startups — even those who have gone big and are still climbing, may soon become only the victims to the ‘big-boys’ lust for power, at the hands of the unscrupulous.
And we find ourselves — private and small business America — the big time loosers for it all.
VFTB
