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Should have been an alternate title for this New York Times article. Not to imply that I don't think the valley's cool.

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If I ever say anything like this, smack me.

Quite simply, Greenplum is using an open source database optimized with supercomputing architecture to bring terabyte scale datawarehousing to enterprises.

— Ed Sim, BeyondVC Blog

I mean it. It should hurt.

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"The previous management had made claims in press interviews and on the company website regarding the status and upcoming release of RealPC OSX claiming it was in late beta and about to be released. After more thorough investigation and interviews with the previous staff, we have found that the development had not formally been started, and it appears not a single line of code has been written. FWB has not to date even received the source code upon which any development would use as the foundation to build a new RealPC for OSX. I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vaporware when it comes to the claims regarding RealPC."

[via Wired's Vaporware Awards]

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Yesterday I received a copy of High Stakes, No Prisoners : A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars that I ordered used through amazon.com. The book so far is quite interesting, and seems to be earning its reputation as an insightful and frank insider's story. The author doesn't shy away from calling certain business plans stupid, or certain famous people incompetent, dishonest, or narcissistic; and he even has strong criticism for some of his own mistakes. You even feel sorry for him, but perhaps only for a little while until you remember he made $133 million selling his company to Microsoft. Their product was the web page editing tool FrontPage.

But possibly the most wonderful thing about this particular book is its inscription. It reads:

Deb
Congratulations on joining THE eGlobalChem Team. We have a winner and are excited to have you on board to realize our dream.

(illegible signature)
1/15/2001

Can we congratulate Deb on her recent third anniversary at eGlobalChem? Well, unfortunately not.

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Welcome to the Tech Bloom.

The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.

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Enormous sums of money were lost in the great Internet bust, and analysts are still wringing their hands over the industry's fall from grace. Has technology, one economist recently wondered, become "just another crummy factor of production"?

But something more was lost in the bust. It has nothing to do with money, at least not directly. It has to do with people and history, with what might be called industrial memory.

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Sure, my dot-com company will sign a 10-year lease!

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Response to Eve Andersson's Diary of a Startup by Michael Yoon.

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By Eve Andersson.

Update 2/12/05: Eve appears to have removed the original article, but it is republished here.