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To Our Readers
CBS' "60 Minutes" aired a segment on Silicon Valley dot-com types this week. I have to confess, as much as I admire what young Internet entrepreneurs have been able to accomplish, by the time the piece was over I was a little tired of the cocky arrogance of some under-30 nouveau-millionaires. Advice to new
multimillionairesThe guy who really got to me was the one who kept saying, "Get used to it."
The Japanese bubble economy and its excesses have invited comparisons with the tulip bulb craze that seized Holland centuries ago. They also inspired more than a little smugness in our friends to the East. Today, some of the most annoying are now whistling "Buddy Can You Spare a (Hundred) Yen."
Consider the guys who sold their luxury Oahu golf courses and hotels for pennies on the dollar in recent years. You won't hear them telling you "get used to it" -- not today, anyway.
Don't get me wrong. The information revolution is the real deal. It has already changed the way that much of the world lives, works and thinks -- and it's still the dawn of the new age. That doesn't make every Internet scheme worth doing, however, let alone worth a boatload of venture capital or my investing my retirement nest egg.
I remember having lunch in the late 1980s with a prominent Honolulu businessman who'd just returned from China. At the time, the economies of Korea, Thailand and Hong Kong were booming. He told me not to expect much from China itself, though. The country was too poor, its problems too complex and its leadership too preoccupied with satisfying bare necessities for the economy to improve. It was flat-lined and would stay that way.
So much for first-hand experience.
Give us two data points and we'll spot a trend. We can't help ourselves. Yet, all human existence needs the same disclaimer they put on mutual funds: "Past performance is no guarantee of future gains."
Sorry, dot-commers, but that's the truth. Get used to it.
John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.