Evening reflection by matey_88

With all the news swirling around lately, it feels to me that we’ve lost a little bit of perspective.  It could be international relations, the stock market or the economy just to name a few, all very important things that affect our lives and life on a global scale. The economy is not the greatest right now.  We’ve witnessed over the past few months some of the worst corruption and corporate negligence on very large scales.  But does that mean everything should be put under the microscope, that everything is wrong rather than the other way around?

Let’s take two of the bigger stories in the tech industry of late: Yahoo! and Steve Jobs.  (I could argue these are not the two biggest things going on but they certainly are driving a large portion of the media coverage)

Yahoo! has been under the microscope for some time now.  And yes, an offer from Microsoft at $33 per share is looking pretty compelling when you look at where the stock is today.  But let’s not lose sight of what is good.  Yahoo! has $7B in revenue, is a known brand and has a number of category leading products. Last time I checked, that is pretty good.

The story with regard to Jobs’ health I find more concerning.  I’m a shareholder in Apple but I don’t think it is my right to probe into the health of an executive.  There is no correlation between Jobs’ health and bad company performance.  So the ‘conspiracy theory’ swirling around this (even if Apple could have been more forthright) just doesn’t deserve this much negative attention.  Because we’ve been burned by poor corporate governance in several situations should not mean that is the litmus test on how we handle all questionable story lines.  In fact, Kara Swisher has what I believe to be a great post with regard to Steve Jobs today over at Boomtown, particularly the transcript of Job’s speech at Stanford.  It is about perspective and a bit of reflection, even in cloudy times, and driving forward from there (that’s what I took from it).

I don’t plan to jump into philosophy here so I won’t.  My sense is everything has reached this point of “permanence”, that all is bad right now and is being looked at with that lens.  With that there’s been some loss of perspective, some loss of reflection on what is really important. Tim O’Reilly recently posted his thoughts on what matters.  I agree with much of what he said.

I’m confident that things are going to look up.  It is going to take some time.  I know one thing though, that it starts with a positive look on things, a look at the things that are important and a passionate drive forward from there.  Just a quick glance back at the innovation that came out of the first bubble burst tells us that is true.  And that is what is at the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit after all.

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