Speaker Day - Bruce Kendall

I honestly was confused a lot by Bruce Kendall.  His presentation seemed very much geared towards those experienced as entrepreneurs or had background experience in business and knew about markets and the like.  I, being a computer science student, was oblivious to these types of things and could not relate with many of the topics he covered.  However, he did bring up some points that would help starting businesses.  For example, he mentioned that there are ways to decide if an organization is successful or not: every five years, one should review a business’s statistics and see how it has been doing.  This way, one would be able to identify if the business is moving in a successful direction and will be able to have many more money-making days for its employees, or if it is going to take a tragic downturn and cost a lot of jobs.  I found it interesting how he mentioned that when there are downturns, a lot of employees can actually gather together and form a business.  However, this seems very difficult because starting a business is by no means a short process and must be carefully thought through and executed in order to become successful.  Bruce also offered a small yet significant consideration for starting businesses: factoring in location.  The location in which a business starts has a heavy impact on its success because many businesses cater to the demographics of the area surrounding them.  Also, if a business is to grow, the type of potential employees that could be hired is also dependent on the area.  Considerations like this made me feel very uneasy about starting a business, but I suppose all businesses had to start somewhere. 

Dot Com to Dot Bomb

Oh, the power of dinosaurs to make class more exciting.  After viewing the Dot Com to Dot Bomb presentation, I learned a lot about the history that sparked the age of the internet, and it made sense that so much of what happened actually happened.  Firstly, businesses that began having websites early in the dot com boom were said to be successful because there were so few websites that you could actually list them out.  This made sense.  However, as more and more websites appeared and having a site became mainstream, those websites early were no longer special for the reason that they were (this is a possible factor contributing to their downturns).  Also, as more people learn to create websites, websites would have improved in terms of functionality, complexity (e.g. better use of HTML), and security.  Websites that did not keep up to those standards would also be put to shame, so this may have been a factor as well.

I found it interesting when Infospace, since it had gone public, was worth more than Boeing.  This was pretty shocking since a new company like Infospace could be worth so much; clearly something was wrong.  It seemed inevitable that all businesses would eventually have a website facing that websites had become so successful.  This, essentially, explained to me the dinosaur analogy: the dinosaurs became so powerful, that they would eventually eat everything the world had to offer and starve (despite the fact they died to a meteor, but this analogy still makes sense).