While catching up on some email today, I came across an confluence in my inbox. First, I catch the following Computerworld headline in a technology industry email newsletter:
A few email later, I run across a humor email (that I’m sure everyone has seen by now) that discusses derivative market explained for laymen. It starts off:
Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers – most of whom are unemployed alcoholics – to drink now but pay later.
My first raction to Heidi’s business plan is ‘how acinine, she’ll never see any money by loaning drinks to alcholics.’ By now we all know the rest of the story about the derivative markets, banks kept giving Heidi loans based on her debt assets only to never see their money come back.
And now we switch over to the alcholic users of the web 2.0, where everyone can get drunk for free off of their favorite services. So, will Twitter’s VCs and Investors ever see their investement dollars turn into the lucrative cash flow that Heidi’s bankers thought they had? Or will Twitter end up with some risk manager calling in the marker and cause the fall of the micro-blogging derivative markets?
Guess Twitter needs to determine which definition of business they want applied to them:
3. a person, partnership, or corporation engaged in commerce, manufacturing, or a service; profit-seeking enterprise or concern.
or will they keep focused on features and building more mass market appeal adding more noise to the signal until they reach
11. excrement: used as a euphemism.
Round and round we go…last call, drink up!