Word: start-up
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Such talk was partly the bravado of engineers who recognize that everything in the universe ends in entropy and disarray. It's also the organized religion of any successful start-up: We're working 120 hours a week, and we may be doomed even if we ship our code on time--but at least we're doomed together, so back to work...
Some people say that perhaps the government stepped in too late, using the feisty start-up as a graphic illustration of Microsoft's anticompetitive might. Exhibit A: the fastest-growing software company in history. Exhibit B: the same start-up less than four years later, crushed like a June bug on the windshield of a great truck screaming along the highway at night...
...Netscape always truly doomed? Talk to any successful start-up in Silicon Valley, and you hear the same story, of how one day Redmond comes to visit and makes an offer. "It was like the Mob," recalls Mark Andreessen, the college kid who helped found the company and who, when the boys from Redmond visited Netscape in April 1995, sat there silently transcribing the meeting on his ThinkPad. "It was an offer you can't refuse" is how Andreessen characterized it. His notes, which he turned over to investigators, showed up last week in the Department of Justice's complaint...
Airlines like Northwest have routinely blown new competitors out of the sky with such tactics, on the theory that letting a low-cost start-up get started up is a bad strategy. Just look at what Southwest Airlines has done. But the tactic--matching low prices and adding more seats, even if it means absorbing losses--has virtually shut out new competition and kept fares high. "The most grievous government failure has been [not to] prosecute what appear to have been flagrant cases of predatory competition by major airlines against new competitors," says Alfred Kahn, the former Civil Aeronautics Board...
...carriers say the start-ups flop because they are undercapitalized and poorly run, offering limited routes and flights, with no frequent-flyer clubs and other features. It is a circular argument, of course. The low fares of the upstarts are based on a cost structure that doesn't have such extras as frequent-flyer programs. And the big airlines force them to burn through their start-up capital by stepping up the price wars...