BSD and HP9K700 standalones . . . ?

[Lynn Fredricks]

> > So while it's true that MetaCard Corp. "went out of 
> business", may we 
> > all go out of business as well as he did. :)
> 
> 
> This reminds me of my last conversation I had with Dr. Raney. 
>  We were discussing his sale to Rev when he told me about his 
> exit strategy.  In my more naive state of business ownership 
> I felt he was selling out.  But he educated me in considering 
> this very important stage and lifespan of a business.  He 
> asked me when I planned to retire and enjoy the fruit of my 
> labor.  I found the handful of conversations we had to be 
> very useful in my formative years.

It is important to differentiate between a company, technology and the
owner. In fact, I have had some conversations with VCs about how they screen
out a lot of start ups by finding out if the owner really understands it.
Ive seen a lot of brilliant work that comes out of deep research (esp from
academics) flounder as a result.

Scott had his "human" exit strategy - retirement. MetaCard had its business
exit strategy - sell assets to Runtime, knowing that Runtime will make long
term investments. I am very glad this is what happened. If the business
can't reach beyond a certain size, then its very hard to keep prepetuating
an infrastructural product like a development environment (or a database
system, for that matter). Open source can alleviate that a bit.

For those who know what Im talking about - remember.. mTropolis? ;-)

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
President
Paradigma Software
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

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