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February 11, 2003
Corporate Sabotage
Today's Deseret News carries a story about corporate sabotage. Seems a company in American Fork fired a systems administrator and the guy took their systems down. The story is a little lame, but the business owner claims $20,000 per day in losses and says they've been down five days. This is a big problem for small businesses---maybe bigger in relative terms than it is for large businesses who have more resources.
As small businesses rely more and more on computers, they have very few resources that they can lean on to provide computer support. Companies like Direct Pointe can provide first class IT support for standardized things like file, print, and messaging, but that doesn't help with things that require more custom approaches.
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Linux War: IP vs. Open Source
As noted in the InforWorld article, SCO has hired David Boies to represent them. Many believe that this indicates that they are going to start aggressively enforcing their IP claims in the Unix space. I wouldn't be at all surprised. As I've noted before, venture firms have themes and one unmistakable theme that you'll find in the Canopy Group is a belief in intellectual property as a competitive advantage. SCO is a Canopy Group company.
A lot of people will be upset and blame SCO for "doing the wrong thing." I don't necessarily see it that way. While, I'm not big on IP, and particularly lawsuits, as a way of creating competitive advantage, I can't blame anyone managing a company for doing anything that is legal and in the best interests of their shareholders. When I was a corporate officer, I took my obligations to the shareholders very seriously and if I were running SCO, I may be making the same moves, regardless of my personal biases. Don't get mad at SCO, go out and prove that a different model yields more shareholder value. Then you've won.