Showing posts with label internet companies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet companies. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Paul Allen claims in his book that Bill Gates tried on more than one occasion to reduce Allen’s relative ownership interest in Microsoft. Of course, the veracity of Allen’s explanation can be questioned even if the factual changes in percentage terms are a matter of public record. In focusing on whether Allen’s explanation is credible, The Wall Street Journal overlooks more fundamental category mistake in reckoning ownership as a species of compensation. Such an error may reflect a hypertrophy involving the value of money in American society—an exaggeration to which the journal may be susceptible as the foremost mouthpiece of American business.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Paul Allen has some critical things to say about his co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. In general, Allen asserts that Gates tried more than once to reduce Allen’s relative financial ownership in the company. Whereas the journal focuses on the veracity of Allen’s claims—ultimately questioning the man’s credibility—I find in the story a case study on the difference between ownership and compensation for labor and on corporate leadership. I contend that the difference may often be minimized in business as well as by society, while particular CEOs are unduly projected onto the societal stage essentially as societal leaders.

Allen also claims in his book that in the mid-1970s, when he and Bill Gates were two college dropouts were based in New Mexico, Gates asked for 60% of their partnership because of his greater contributions to the creation of software for running the BASIC programming language on an early PC, the MITS Altair 8800. Allen says he had assumed that their partnership was evenly split, but he agreed Gates' request anyway. Several years later when Gates and Allen established Microsoft as a formal partnership, Gates asked to change their respective shares in the business to a 64-36 split, a demand to which Allen again agreed. Furthermore, in the early 1980s, Gates rebuffed Allen after the latter asked for an increase in his own Microsoft shares after his work on a successful Microsoft product called SoftCard, Allen writes that he was deeply disappointed in Gates’ response; he had known Gates since they were students at a prestigious private school in Seattle. "In that moment, something died for me," Allen writes. "I'd thought that our partnership was based on fairness, but now I saw that Bill's self-interest overrode all other considerations. My partner was out to grab as much of the pie as possible and hold on to it, and that was something I could not accept." Allen recounts that he sucked it up and thought, "OK…but one day I'm out of here." 
                                       
                                    Bill Gates and Paul Allen, co-founders of Microsoft

                                       By Doug Wilson/Corbis, printed in The Wall Street Journal 

Furthermore, Allen asserts that in 1982 he eavesdropped on a discussion in the Microsoft offices in Bellevue, Wash., between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, who went on to become the company's CEO. Allen claims that he heard the two men talking about his recent lack of productivity and how they might dilute his equity in the company by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders. Allen said he burst into the room and confronted the two men, both of whom later apologized to him and backed down from their plan. "I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off. . . . It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple." If so, then the vaunted veneer of societal leadership that Bill Gates has attained by virtue of his achievements in software, sheer wealth, and philanthropy may be a projection of something more than the man, and thus a reflection of societal values.

Of course, there are two sides to squabbles, and this case is no exception. Gates's attempts to lower Mr. Allen's stake in the company reflected concerns that Allen wasn't working hard enough and wasn't commitment to the company, say people familiar with the relationship according to the journal. That was one reason, these people say, why Gates put a provision in their first partnership agreement that would allow him to buy out Allen if he thought there were "irreconcilable differences" between the two men. Allen refers to the provision but does not include a reason for it, which is telling. Furthermore, third parties with knowledge of meeting to which Allen refers claim that Allen puts himself in meetings that he did not in fact attend. If true, Allen’s claims regarding Gates could also be doubted, though there is factual support for the changes in ownership percentages even if not for the reasons.

If Gates was putting more effort into the business, an argument based on that could be made that he should receive a higher percentage of the ownership so he would receive more dividends. However, it could also be argued that ownership, unlike compensation, is based on having founded a business (or having purchased the rights to such a basis by buying stock-ownership). Gates may have conflated compensation with ownership in demanding a greater percentage of stock, essentially regarding the latter as compensation in treating dividends as a form of salary. Such a conflation may distort property ownership in a way that minimizes the fundamental difference between an owner and an employee. Of course, an owner can work as an employee of his own business, but the two roles are distinct. Gates’ mistaken notion of ownership may have been formed out of a society that over-values executive compensation, and more generally money. Consider, for example, the much higher compensation packages that American managers receive relative to their European colleagues. Relatedly, the ratio of executive to “lower level” employee compensation in the U.S. is much higher than in the E.U.  Such differences point to differences in societal values, and such values can, if exaggerated, lead to category mistakes. So Allen’s complaint against his boyhood friend and business partner may actually be a critique of a much larger problem in American society.

Click to add a Comment or Question (and View Posted Comments) on Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft and the wider implications for business and society. 



Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The question of the role of social media internet companies as protesters use them to communicate on their protests and governments exploded on the world stage in the context of the protests going in the Middle East in early 2011. Lest it be presumed that the firms’ respective policies are relevant only in terms of what content (or users) is allowed and how that content could impact events on the ground, the policies themselves reflect on the claim made by the West that we are the land of the free. In other words, if social media companies are (allowed to be) oppressive or otherwise not respectful of their customers, the overall message to the oppressed in the Middle East cannot be that greater freedom is indeed possible because it exists here. Lest our own private sector unwittingly undercut the words and efforts of the protesters, we might want to use this case to ask if we couldn’t be freer too.
According to Ebele Okobi-Harris, the director of the business and human rights program at Yahoo, which owns Flickr, the case of el-Hamalwy, an Egyptian activist whose uploaded pictures of security agents were abruptly taken down by Flickr staff, has prompted internal discussions about whether Flickr should reconsider its approach. What if the photos had been his own and he had not yet backed them up? Flickr’s abrupt and unannounced action suddenly seems quite oppressive. Fortunately, managers at Flickr are at least thinking about the issue. “As the uses of these social networks evolve,” Harris said, “we have to start thinking about how to create rules on how to apply rules that also facilitate human rights activists using these tools.”
According to The New York Times, Harris “pointed to the challenges of balancing the existing rules and terms of service for users with the new ways that activists are using these tools. One challenge is whether a company should maintain its commitment to remain neutral about content, even when politicized content could offend users or even put people in danger. ‘Does a company take responsibility for the content?’” Okobi-Harris asked. For instance, what, el-Hamalawy asks, would Flickr do if a group that opposes abortion wanted to post photographs of doctors who perform abortions? In his own case, el-Hamalawy “said Flickr’s decision to take down the photos left him not only frustrated and angry but also terrified. ‘Everyone knew that I had released those photos,’ he said. ‘Then the photos were gone. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking that at any minute, they were going to come for me.’” Would Flickr managers be responsible for el-Hamalawy’s death if it was occasioned by Flickr’s action?  Or was it his own act in uploading the photos in the first place that put his life at risk? To be sure, Flickr should have notified him before taking down his pictures; the company is responsible for causing him fear. However, this seems more like bad business than unethical conduct on Flickr’s part. Whether a customer is a protester oppressed by a dictatorship or simply a novice photographer who has uploaded her own pictures, there does appear to be reason to withhold one’s trust from Flickr staff.
Beyond the matter of bad customer relations—which seems to be ubiquitous in American business—the question of whether social media, which includes Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube among others—is unwittingly biased toward oppressive governments even if only from a desire to maintain control over its site must be addressed. In early 2011, it became clear that such companies were increasingly being used by activists and pro-democracy forces, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, to the notice of their governments. As Harris asked of Flickr, does a social media company have responsibility for the content?  Furthermore, it should be asked whether such a company should be susceptible to the influence of governments, whether in identifying users or barring their content?
According to The New York Times, the “new role for social media has put these companies in a difficult position: how to accommodate the growing use for political purposes while appearing neutral and maintaining the practices and policies that made these services popular in the first place.” The New York Times reports that “YouTube was one of the first social media networks to wrestle with content posted by a human rights advocate that conflicted with its terms of service. In November 2007, YouTube removed videos flagged as “inappropriate” by a community member that showed a person in Egypt being tortured by the police. They were uploaded by Wael Abbas, another Egyptian blogger involved in opposing torture in Egypt. After a public outcry, YouTube staff members reviewed the videos and restored them.” Had YouTube managers been influenced by Egypt in taking down the video, the company would have effectively taken sides in the Egyptian dispute between its government and people. Absent such pressure, the issue could simply be whether a warning notice is appropriate given the graphic nature of the violence being shown. I made the horrible mistake, for example, of watching the slow beheading of a Western hostage by a terrorist group in the Middle East. Even a year or two later, I can still hear the man’s raspy voice shouting for dear life as his throat was being deprived of air while his murderers pathologically invoked their deity’s name as if their act had been sanctioned by a power higher than, and thus somehow justifying, their own anger and resentment. Because I looked ignored the “graphic content” warning (as they are perhaps too commonly used), perhaps the issue facing YouTube does indeed go beyond whether such a warning should apply. In my case, my curiosity got the better of me. Should YouTube have been responsible for protecting me from myself? This seems like a tall order, especially as it could invite the staff to discriminate between content based on their political or ideological positions. It could be that the staff could limit their intervention only to extremely graphic content, with review taking place in the company in the particularly cases.  Still, in a free society, citizens ultimately must take responsibility for ignoring warnings; I don’t believe that a government or private company can protect citizens from themselves, even if it can protect us from others of us who would seek to harm, mislead or cheat us.
Regarding Facebook, The New York Times reported on March 26, 2011, the company “has remained mostly quiet about its increasing role among activists in the Middle East who use the site to connect dissident groups, spread information about government activities and mobilize protests. But Facebook is now finding itself drawn into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has been pushed to defend its neutral approach and terms of service to some supporters of Israel, including an Israeli government official. Yuli Edelstein, an Israeli minister of diplomacy and diaspora affairs, sent a letter [in March] to Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to remove a Facebook page created on March 6 named the Third Palestinian Intifada. The page, which calls for an uprising in the occupied Palestinian territory in May, has more than 240,000 members. ‘As Facebook’s C.E.O. and founder, you are obviously aware of the site’s great potential to rally the masses around good causes, and we are all thankful for that,’ Mr. Edelstein wrote. ‘However, such potential comes hand in hand with the ability to cause great harm, such as in the case of the wild incitement displayed on the above-mentioned page.’ Facebook has, so far, not removed the page. The administrators are not advocating violence, and therefore, it falls within the company’s definition of acceptable speech, company officials said. ‘We want Facebook to be a place where people can openly discuss issues and express their views, while respecting the rights and feelings of others,’said Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for public policy at the company.”
“Wild incitement” can pertain to the pro-democracy rallies that had been taking place throughout the Middle East. Even if violence were being called for in the Intifada, would Facebook (or Twitter) remove such content if it had been put up by an Egyptian or Libyan protester?  More pointedly, what if a page or tweet referred to “wild incitement” in the midst of being attacked by government troops or police? How far removed is an occupied people to such intimidation on a daily basis? Should they be barred from tweeting, “Come help me at X intersection b/c police are beating my elderly parents”? The staff at Facebook are smart not to intervene in disputes between a government and its people. If anything, an America-based company has a basis in taking the side of the oppressed, for the United States came into existence from British oppression. Relatedly, the U.S. Government acts in concert with its own beginning whenever it takes the side of a people protesting against governmental oppression.
Even if Facebook does not intervene to censor content, it is possible, even likely, that particular policies are inherently in the advantage of vengeful government agencies and a threat to Facebook’s customers. For example, The New York Times reports that “Human rights advocates have also criticized Facebook for not being more flexible with some of its policies, specifically its rule requiring users to create accounts with their real names. Danny O’Brien, the Internet advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, cited the case of Michael Anti, an independent journalist and blogger from China whose Facebook account was deactivated in January because he had not used his state-given name to create it. In addition to losing the ability to publish and communicate on Facebook, and not wanting to use his real name because of China’s strict rules governing freedom of speech and harsh response to those activists who violate them, he has lost the contact information for thousands of people in his Facebook community. ‘One can’t expect all of these services to provide everything to everyone,’ said Mr. O’Brien. ‘I think that part of the solution is to provide people with a dignified way of leaving the service.’”
O’Brien was giving too much to Facebook. It is insufficient to expect Facebook to merely provide its customers with a dignified way to leave (or be deprived of service). In addition, Facebook ought to respect the preference of some of its customers to anonymity. Facebook’s staff would still have those customers’ contact info (more of which could be demanded and verified in such cases), so anonymity would not be an excuse to get away with unethical or illegal conduct, such as publically defaming someone by making false claims. At the very least, a person’s anonymity being refused is a basis for that person to lie ethically about being on Facebook. Moreover, Facebook’s insistence that real names be used adds to the argument that the U.S. Constitution should be amended to include an explicit right to privacy. Much of the criticism of Roe v. Wade is actually that the justices “found” such a right being implicit in that constitution. While the problem regarding Facebook insisting that customers use their real names may have implications for U.S. constitutional law, we may simply have a matter here of bad business (i.e., bad customer service). In an economy kept competitive by anti-trust law, the emergence of a competitor with more respect for its customers could be anticipated. Ironically, having a government strong enough in resisting the lure of industry lobbyists that it enforces anti-trust law with sharp teeth can actually spread liberty by allowing for competition. Such liberty could be expected to leave its own imprint in the world in the midst of the pro-democracy protests in the Middle East. In fact, Facebook having respect for its potential and actual customers who prefer anonymity could send a message stronger than any from the protesters or human rights advocates in the Middle East—namely, “Look over here! Real freedom is possible!”
Click to add a Comment or Question (or View Posted Comments) on social media companies on democracy and protesters.

Source:
Jennifer Preston, “Ethical Quandary for Social Sites,” NYT, March 26, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/business/media/28social.html?_r=2&hp

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the ethics involved in providing a social media service for the public.  The article describes how “(t)wo days after using Flickr to display photos of police officers from Egypt’s feared state security force, Hossam el-Hamalawy watched in disbelief as they vanished, one by one, from the popular social networking site, which he had been using since 2008. ‘I thought I was being hacked,’ said Mr. el-Hamalawy, a prominent Egyptian blogger and human rights activist who had uploaded the headshots of the police from CDs found by activists early this month at the State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City. He later learned . . .  that the photos had been removed because he did not take the images himself, a violation of the site’s . . . rules. ‘That is totally ludicrous,’ he said. ‘Flickr is full of accounts with photos that people did not take themselves.’” Astonishingly, Ebele Okobi-Harris, the director of the business and human rights program at Yahoo, which owns Flickr, “acknowledged el-Hamalawy was correct in noting that Flickr’s . . . rules are not applied consistently.” To be sure, Harris was firm on the purpose of Flickr: “Flickr was set up . . . for people who love photography to share their photographs. In this particular case, we had someone who wanted to use Flickr, not for photographs that he took, but for photographs that he found somewhere else. The community rules are about sharing your own content. You can’t upload photos that are not your own.” So even if uploading another’s picture does not violate copyright law, it is still extrinsic to Flickr.
The unfairness identified by el-Hamalawy has to do with the inconsistency in enforcement by Flickr employees. This raises the question: what if it is virtually impossible to enforce a rule?  Should the “easy cases” be enforced anyway? From an ethical standpoint, Flickr staff should enforce the policy across the board or not at all. If the rule is practically unenforceable except in rather obvious cases, selective enforcement is still unethical. Aside from the matter of enforcement, it may be asked whether people uploading photos from the public domain simply to show them is all that bad, especially as it goes on anyway. In fact, “simply to show them” is problematic as a viable constraint because motive is a difficult thing to assess. This opens the door to the motive of a protester such as el-Hamalawy. His motive in displaying the pictures of security agents was not simply to show them, as if they had aesthetic value. Here motive does seem to go beyond a site set up to show photos, but enforcement is once again the problem.
I think Facebook would have been a more suitable site for el-Hamalawy’s photos of the security agents; such mug shots would fit better on a “wall” than at a site oriented simply to displaying photos. Even so, Flickr ought not presume to judge motives from the photos themselves, so the staff would be better off with a policy simply stating that the users alone are responsible for the content that they upload. For otherwise, Flickr becomes more than a conduit (in which case the company would be liable for any content uploaded by users because the assumption is that the staff are monitoring the content). Perhaps within Flickr there could be a special area reserved for the users’ own work—assuming adequate and consistent enforcement, of course.
Click to add a Question or Comment (or View Posted Comments) on ethics at Flickr as social media.

Source:
Jennifer Preston, “Ethical Quandary for Social Sites,” NYT, March 26, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/business/media/28social.html?_r=2&hp

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

On March 17, 2011, USA Today observed, “Tech and Internet stocks turned into bad words after the dot-com bust in 2000. But the get-rich-quick feelings toward tech are back. . . . Given the near-hysteria about promising but largely unproven companies, investment [practitioners] warn that things could start getting out of hand.” So why doesn’t the government step in and stop it from going so far and then crashing?  This is easier said than done. Beyond the difficulties in having regulators intercede to stop transactions that may be necessary to avert a party from bankruptcy, the sheer ambiguity in ascertaining whether a bubble does in fact exist can have a paralyzing effect. "It's a boom, not a bubble, when you hear the sound of dynamite profits," according to Bing Gordon, a partner at a venture-capital firm and a board member of social-gaming company Zynga, which was valued at $9 billion in March of 2011.

However, a big boom can explode in a giant bust; Gordon’s distinction doesn’t carry much water. Neither does that of Geoff Yang, a founding partner of Redpoint Ventures. "There is effervescence, but no bubble." Effervescence can manifest, however, as an attribute of the sort of irrational exuberance that characterizes bubbles. That the market mechanism not only does not temper, but may even magnify the volatility from, this all-too-human psychology, whether in pushing a “boom” or “bubble,” is the real problem. Government regulation will not be able to effectively pull up this root until its nature is uncovered. In the meantime, we are left with the problem of discerning whether a bubble can even be identified as it is expanding. Consider, for example, Facebook in 2010.

In 2010, Facebook had about $2 billion in revenue according to USA Today. MSNBC puts the company’s profit for that year at $600 million. Facebook was being valued at $75 billion, based on private transactions from the SharesPost market. If an accurate valuation, USA Today claimed that “this would make the social-media upstart more valuable than Disney.” It would also mean that Facebook had a price-earnings ratio (P/E) of 125.  This essentially means that higher future profits were expected.  The average P/E ratio for the technology sector was about 25, making 125 extraordinarily high.  This could be taken as being indicative of irrational exuberance,  as one typically compares a company’s number with the average of its sector. However, the technology sector was quite broad at the time, and one would expect companies on the forefront like Google, Yahoo and Facebook to have much higher numbers than other companies in the sector. In other words, even a very high P/E ratio, even relative to a sector’s average, does not necessary point to there being a bubble. Therefore, it is notoriously difficult to identify one definitively without ongoing debate delaying any regulatory action.  Also, if the sector itself is in the grip of irrational exuberance, comparing a company’s ratio to the average is relatively useless in proffering an indication.

In March of 2011, USA Today claimed, “Even big companies are said to be drinking the Internet Kool-Aid. There is speculation that Google and Facebook have considered bidding as much as $10 billion for online microblogging service Twitter.”  In December of 2010, according to USA Today, “The New York Times reported that Twitter was valued at $3.7 billion after a funding round. In March of the following year, it was pegged at about $7.2 billion, according to SharesPost.” The sheer variance between these figures indicates high risk, but this did not seem to bother those drinking the kool-aid. Such psychology is a red-flag that a bubble is likely in the works. It is like a tornado watch: conditions are right for one to form.

The risk can be seen by uncovering fallacies in the way the private tech companies are valued. According to USA Today, “Until companies finally go public and the stocks actively trade on major exchanges, the small and relatively thin trading on private markets sets the price. . . .  Private marketplaces, including SecondMarket and SharesPost, allow owners of shares of private companies such as Digg, Facebook, Zynga and Twitter to sell to high-net-worth individuals and institutions. Typically, the sellers are employees at these firms looking to cash in on shares they've received. And the buyers are sophisticated investors who understand they could lose their entire investment. These online services provide a way for employees to sell their shares now rather than waiting for an IPO that may never occur. However, with the great power that such marketplaces offer comes confusion. Many of the valuations put on companies are overinflated based on limited sales of shares occurring on the relatively small markets. . . . Before long, estimates for the value of popular Internet companies can soar.” In short, one should not generalize from a highly particularized market to project a total market value because there are unique dynamics going on in that market that would not apply were the firm listed on the NYSE.

Crucially, the generalization is in the direction of overstating; hence, it can camouflage irrational exuberance while feeding it. Therefore, risk is increased by how private companies are restrictively “traded” even as the risk is cloaked—making it even more dangerous. “Given such huge risks, the level of the public's infatuation with shares of privately held Internet companies is again taking on a feel of a mania, Gary Freedman, securities lawyer, said, according to USA Today. He noted that several ingredients that inflate bubbles were all present, including a broad acceptance of the companies' products.  Intensifying the distortion, according to him, was the fact that there was very little financial information on these private companies. "It's the same mania," he claimed. "Markets are cyclical. It's really no different than looking at the Internet bust and the housing market." Lest one conclude from this a slam-dunk case, USA Today pointed out that the not all of the practitioners were on board.  That is to say, there was serious difference on whether there was any bubble at all.

USA Today represented the other side as follows: “proponents of the next breed of Internet companies say the valuations aren't absurd this time because the companies have fundamentals behind them. ‘We're talking about real companies with real revenue and real profit,’ says Jeremy Smith of SecondMarket. A major shift in technology is bound to create companies with massive market values, the proponents say. The emergence of social media (more than 500 million accounts on Facebook alone), combined with mobile phone use (4.5 billion), is disrupting all of technology, so giant winners are to be expected, say venture-capitalists such as Cohler and Yang. ‘I think this boom is going to last awhile,’ Ted Schlein, a managing partner at KPCB, averred. ‘The trend lines are unlike anything we've seen in history,’ He says the enormous size of the social and mobile Internet market — tens of billions of people — dwarfs the markets for the fledgling Internet (billions) and personal computers (hundreds of millions), putting companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Zynga in prime position to strike it rich in IPOs. ‘This is just the beginning of a big market run,’ says Tim Draper, founder of a venture-capital firm.”

To be sure, the emergence of social media had been a huge phenomenon in defining or characterizing the age from roughly the year 2000. Indeed, the computer and internet may have represented the biggest change in daily life from the world of even the last few decades of the twentieth century. It follows that anything so big would have attracted a lot of money, as per Facebook’s ratio of 125. However, like a jet plane that steeply climbs on take-off and then eventually levels off, the social media companies could not be expected to remain the leading edge forever; they were bound to level off at some point, and then the extended boom would be truncated or even turned to a bust if the market gets stung by the high P/E ratios. Moreover, a bubble just is an expectation of an “extended boom.” The “bubble” lies in the difference between the expectation and the reality that even such a boom is apt to end.

All of this is to say, identifying a bubble in progress with some degree of consensus does not seem to be possible, at least as of 2011. Were such an identification even possible, what would government regulators do to let the air out of the balloon? If Facebook, itself iffy with a P/E ratio of 125, wants to buy Twitter for $10 billion even though the latter had been valued at just over $3 billion a few months before, would blocking the purchase lessen the bubble? Were Twitter in trouble in spite of its growing presumed market value, would its bankruptcy take the air out of the bubble only to provoke a recession?  The aim of the regulators would have to be to release air from the balloon without triggering a recession (which is the downside of a bubble anyway). If anything is clear, it is that much more knowledge is needed for the market to be managed, let alone designed, so bubbles are identified and depressed before doing so could do harm to an economy as a whole. In the meantime, we can expect bubbles to top up because markets are susceptible to the human psychology of irrational exuberance.   

Click to add a Comment or Question (or View Posted Comments) on whether a social media bubble exists.

Sources:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41521349/ns/business-us_business/

 

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