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4/4/2002 1:31:45 PM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...> wrote: > >Management training is that until a case >with value is made, the answer is always No. >Why? It is easier to change no to yes than >yes to no. Ah, but what is value? This quarter's bottom line? Next year's revenue? A viable business under a wide range of assumptions about the rest of the world? A 1% chance of becoming richer than Gates? A 1/10% chance of saving humanity from anihilation? Well trained managers in the US auto industry maximized "value" and chose not to build small cars, and almost killed the industry when the price of gasoline quadrupled in 1973. [Ahem, past could be prologue ...I don't want to think about it ...] Ken Olson saw no value in PCs, and 10 years (?) later had to sell DEC to a PC company. I'm sure we could think up dozens of similar examples of decisions that were perfectly rational, but utterly wrong. I don't have strong feelings about XML 1.1 / Namespaces 1.1, but sometimes the value proposition "it just makes more SENSE this way" is the right decision.
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