Sickly sweet Silicon Valley
The New York Times reports on investigations into insider trading and fraud by Silicon Valley companies, after the Department of Justice called for a few sacrifices among the digerati for the sake of its "Clean-up Corruption" campaign. The natives are sure that no one in the valley could possibly do anything wrong--after all, isn't technology ethically neutral? I love this from my friend Stewart Alsop:
"The carpetbaggers showed up, and the day-trippers and tourists came along, and with that you got some crooks," Mr. Alsop said. "There is a pretty gray line between incompetence and fraud."
Well, then, there are a lot of incompetents in Silicon Valley. In reality, there are certainly some crooks, but the real crime is that investors paid for a lot of people to get the experience of launching an IPO. People who were not ready to run their companies for the profit of the investor and not just themselves.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at December 29, 2002 07:34 PM | TrackBack