His reviews would've been a lot funnier if Arsdigita didn't crash and burn years ago.
>He doesn't get into the question of whether the investors from 1980 are happy now that they own less than 70 percent of the company.
They should be happy considering GE's value rose 4000% during Jack Welch's tenure at GE.[1]
When Jack Welch became General Electric’s CEO in 1981, the company was worth about $14 billion. When he retired 20 years later, GE was worth nearly $500 billion.[2]
GE does build lots of cool engineering things, but those alone couldn't have made it the most valuable company in the world at one point. It also involved a lot of, well, financial engineering, which this guy started to describe better than I could ever have: https://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/immelt-ge-capital...
I also remember than in the hot days of early October 2008 there were talks of GE the entire company going down on behalf of its subsidiary, GE Capital. Those were indeed some crazy days.
GE Capital was founded in 1932. Jack Welch left GE in 2001 (GE's market cap was $500 billion), 7-8 years prior to the financial crisis. If you're going to blame someone for GE's problems blame Jeff Immelt, don't blame Jack Welch.
His reviews would've been a lot funnier if Arsdigita didn't crash and burn years ago.
On the other hand, it's famously uncertain as to whether that's his fault: http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ . I haven't seen a compelling rebuttal of this narrative.
I don't know if it was anyone's fault really. They were a services company whose business model only made sense in the halcyon days of dotcom 1.0.
Maybe they could have used that as a launching pad for something that would have survived the trough, or maybe they could have been acquired at the perfect time a la Mark Cuban and our gracious host, but the fact that they didn't doesn't much point to any fatal failures of judgment. A lot of people got swept up in the bubble and subsequent crash (just as a lot of people are getting swept up in dotcom 2.0 and will cry bitter tears when it too crashes.)
>He doesn't get into the question of whether the investors from 1980 are happy now that they own less than 70 percent of the company.
They should be happy considering GE's value rose 4000% during Jack Welch's tenure at GE.[1]
When Jack Welch became General Electric’s CEO in 1981, the company was worth about $14 billion. When he retired 20 years later, GE was worth nearly $500 billion.[2]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch
[2]http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/jack-welch-and-...