How sad that Bruce Wasserstein died just as it appears that the M&A market is heating up again. I got to know Bruce when I was editing Harvard Business Review; with one of my colleagues, Gardiner Morse, I produced one of HBR’s trademark in-depth interviews, published in January 2008. 

Bruce was a curious guy, in both meanings of the word. His extraordinary mind was able to see deals through multiple dimensions simultaneously - he compared deals to prisms that should be turned and examined from every angle.  The very complexity of his insight left him almost inarticulate sometimes; unable to express everything he saw, he would speak in what sounded like koans or riddles.

Two dangerous ideas have been devouring capital and sucking the life-force from entrepreneurs. The first is the notion that you can build a viable Web business by relying on advertising alone - that if you attract enough eyeballs, enough ad revenue will follow to see you through to profitability. The second is the Long Tail hypothesis: the idea that, because “shelf space” on the Web is unlimited, it’s possible to build a business selling products on the “long tail” - that segment of demand that is on the opposite end of the curve from the bestseller list, where, the argument goes, you can sell onesies and twosies - unusual products to idiosyncratic buyers - that couldn’t be sold profitably before.

There's been a bit of "controversy" this past week in SpinVox world. Like some silly season feeding frenzy, egged on by a cheerleadership of malcontents, the hack pack descended on the pride of Marlow making outrageous claims about the Spinvox business, and SpinVox management. Unsurprisingly, the SpinVox team who, groaning under a slew of industry awards received in recent weeks, are rather busy managing the rapid growth of a profoundly successful business have had some unwelcome extra work to do in responding to the media circus.

For three days at the end of May — the 24th through the 26th — scores of world business leaders gathered in Copenhagen to discuss ideas and options leading up to the UN climate conference to be held in the same city in November, when a treaty to supplant and extend the Kyoto accords with the promulgated for ratification by the nations of the world, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I’ve been playing with population pyramids. These are graphical depictions of a country’s population showing the number of women and men in five-year age bands. They’re called pyramids because, historically, humankind has lots more infants than school children, more schoolchildren than lovers, more lovers than.... as time takes it toll on each of the seven ages of man.

"Careers" is a board game I played as a child. At the start of each game, players wrote down a secret Success Formula by allocating 60 points among money, fame, and happiness. They could seek 20 of each, 60 of one and none of the others - whatever they wished - then off they'd go, rolling the dice and following a chosen career path in the hope of earning the rewards that would achieve success as they had defined it. You might think of Careers as an early exercise in work-life balance.

Friday General Electric's stock hit  $6.66 - the number of the Beast. You don't have to be religious to find that scary. We were joking, grimly, around the office that we should make an intra-departmental bonus pool by buying blue chip stocks - perhaps Bank of America ($3.59), Citigroup ($1.03), DuPont ($5.34), Alcoa ($5.22), Ford ($1.70), Newscorp ($5.31) - counting GE, about $30 for a one-share basket, about $1000 if we bought a basket for everyone in the department. That would be less than the cost of  taking the team to dinner. My own opinion, even if a couple of those companies went to zero (I don't have to tell you which), the basket is likely to be worth a more a year from now - so if we paid ourselves the bonus, we could go to a better restaurant and order a few bottles of a modest, good value claret.

Have you ever noticed that the only business people who talk about level playing fields are those on the downside of a field that is tilted?  The whole point of business is to find  high ground, preferably surrounded by briars, moats, walls, and other barriers to entry. Therein lie profits; outside be monsters.

This article was originally published as http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/sun_microsystems_entrepreneur_country_cloud by Wayne Horkan, Chief Technology Officer, United Kingdom and Ireland at Sun Microsystems. Wayne's blog can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/

"Never make someone a priority for whom  you're just an option."