Education and Service

Services, does your company sell a service? Education: Do teachers help students raise their math grades online by visiting your website? Retirement: Do bankers help seniors plan their retirement by visiting your website? Do they pay for a service by the hour, day, or month? Is there a fee charged and collected? Internet companies were promising to make millions in initial public offerings that had no merit? I heard IPO thrown around the United States from Nashville to Santa Barbara, New York City to San Francisco Bay. What is an IPO? IPO stands for initial public offering. Brokers simply say, “Offering” or “Going Public.” The company’s IPO is a symbolic birth to the stock market. The company offers the public shares of stock. The public is allowed to buy, sell, purchase, and trade the stock. IPO was bounced around the way a volley ball flies in the air over a court without ever touching the ground. Not one executive had their feet on sold ground. Worst Chairman told lies and believed the lies they told. These lies were written in annual reports before being sold to investors. Instead of understanding software, the marketing department was selling logos and insisting on money in the budget for new logos. No money for the product software. Money to design logos for a small start up company. Websites float out in cyberspace. A cement foundation made for pavement isn’t necessary. Nor is a parking lot, office space, air conditioning, or heaters. Some of the best online companies started inside a garage. Let me make this clear. Engineers wanted to invent a product. These scientists wanted to create a service. So they began with this: Parking a car outside. The empty car garage is where the company began. The company earned millions of dollars. Not in a Wall Street office building. Not in a Hollywood studio with wifi, fax machines, and free coffee refills. The best companies started out in empty rooms with great ideas, minds build on development, and terrific problem seeking solutions. How to build a faster processor? How to build a clearer monitor? How to hook the computer up to a printer via wifi? How to mail a note across a wire from one computer to another computer across the room? In 1992, the company were I taught English in Prague, Czech Republic lost a huge real estate contract from Chicago, Illinois because the fax machines didn’t work. The secretary turned off all the machines when she left the office. She had never left Prague. She didn’t realize that 5:00 pm in Prague was 10:00 am in Chicago. Five years later in 1997, there were no wifi, high speed connections, or advance cell phones in our downtown San Francisco office? My boss and I paid a lot of money to have a T-1 for high speed Internet. The wait for the T-1 engineer to set up the network took three weeks. We both found ourselves returning to work on Sunday morning as early as 5:30 am because we enjoyed navigating the web at a high speed. Now every child has a high speed cell phone with web search features. There are wireless operations inside the fast food chains.