NDAs Re: [Beowulf] Nvidia, cuda, tesla and... where's my double floating point?

[Karen Shaeffer]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 11:41:34AM -0700, Jim Lux wrote:
> 
> Well.. to be fair, there were (and still are) businesses out there 
> (particularly a few years ago) that didn't fully understand the 
> concept of needing net profit. (ah yes, the glory days of startups 
> "buying market share" in the dot-com bubble) And, some folks made a 
> fine living in the mean time. (But, then, those folks weren't the 
> owners, were they, or if they were, in a limited sense, they now have 
> some decorative wallpaper..)
> 

Hi Jim,
I think you have the common view about this. The reality is many of
those same companies would be making money today. They were just
ahead of their time -- which is very common here in Silicon Valley.
Having good ideas or exceptional technology is not enough -- you
need to time it right -- or you don't survive. I love the example
of IP telephony. I first heard of friends in IP telephony startups
in 1993-4 time frame. They and a long line of others went bankrupt,
until Skype hit it big.

The .com bust is about as hyped as you can get. They used to love
to bash San Francisco as the symbol of the bust. Take a look at this
month's cover of San Francisco magazine. Timing is everything in
life. (smiles ;)

http://www.sanfranmag.com/

And even worse, they lumped the failure of big iron companies
and especially Sun Microsystems during that time with the .com
bust, when, in reality, everyone was moving to commodity hardware
and Linux during that time frame -- the business press just didn't
want to report that at the time... Go figure.

And timing isn't just about being to early. A good example today is
all those new Internet search companies that are litering Silicon
Valley today. Most of them will fail, because they are too late. Some
will get bought out -- but most are going to fail. Timing works both
ways.

Just my view from the trenches of Silicon Valley,
Karen
-- 
 Karen Shaeffer
 Neuralscape, Palo Alto, Ca. 94306
 shaeffer at neuralscape.com  http://www.neuralscape.com