Old economy, new economy….it’s greed that ultimately drives it all anyway. Greed can be a good thing, because it can lead to research being funded, good products being put out, etc. For those people, the end product justifies the means getting there.
It’s too easy to say “I told you so”, even though most deserve it. Others are being hurt just for their association with the industry, as the article points out, which isn’t really fair, but who ever said the stock market was fair? Yes, the greed of VCs may have caused all this to start, but remember, it was consumers and stockholders demanding new products and ever-increasing profits that kept the ball rolling, until it went right over the edge. It’s easy to point fingers, but there’s a lot of investors and impatient consumers who did contribute somewhat.
I’m not really sure why I’m defending VCs here, I do believe that they caused a lot of problems, but they did have some good guesses, didn’t they? And, ultimately, people will forget the fall of last spring, and go back to their habits, recalling it as we recall the stock crash of 1929 or even the late 80’s, saying it was pretty bad, but hey, it’s past, and it won’t happen again. And then it will. Maybe we’ll even be writing the same things again in ten or fifteen years. IMHO, the people best off now are those who keep their firms privately owned – sure, you don’t have as much capital as publicly owned companies, and you don’t have stock options, but my guess is that these companies work to a real end, not just to raise stockholders’ earnings, and are therefore free to do more in general.