I am still delighted with sparkfun.com, especially this comment:
I forgot to mention, that company (Sparkfun) was created in 2003, and it now has 143 employees, 75 million dollars of sales, 600,000 customers and makes 431 unpatented products.
When I was growing up, business people always bragged how many people they had working for them - "I have 2500 employees" "I manage a 3000 employee division." As USA policy precipitated outsourcing for tax avoidance and money laundering reasons, never for cheap labor, we heard less and less of this, to where no one says it now.
If it is selling and it is unpatented, that means you know how to market. If it is selling, and it is patented, it means you know to use state violence to enforce a monopoly. The latter would be shameful.
Almost none of the over 7 million patents issued by the USPTO ever turns into a product. Did you know that? And almost nothing patented that turns into a product is ever profitable. Did you know that? If there is any correlation at all, it is patents = failure.
Maybe we'll begin to hear from people how many unpatented products they sell. Now there is a measure of success!
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
I forgot to mention, that company (Sparkfun) was created in 2003, and it now has 143 employees, 75 million dollars of sales, 600,000 customers and makes 431 unpatented products.
When I was growing up, business people always bragged how many people they had working for them - "I have 2500 employees" "I manage a 3000 employee division." As USA policy precipitated outsourcing for tax avoidance and money laundering reasons, never for cheap labor, we heard less and less of this, to where no one says it now.
If it is selling and it is unpatented, that means you know how to market. If it is selling, and it is patented, it means you know to use state violence to enforce a monopoly. The latter would be shameful.
Almost none of the over 7 million patents issued by the USPTO ever turns into a product. Did you know that? And almost nothing patented that turns into a product is ever profitable. Did you know that? If there is any correlation at all, it is patents = failure.
Maybe we'll begin to hear from people how many unpatented products they sell. Now there is a measure of success!
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
1 comments:
John,
In the comments section of the website, I found an interesting point raised by a user. What do you do when you invested into a research project that took 4 years, 20 people, and millions of dollars? Hand out all your results to your competitors so they can clone your work and sell it? But then, won't they have an advantage since they invested nothing into the project and are now millions of dollars ahead of you?
Could this be an exception for patents? In a free society, could this be one of these situations in which you keep your results secret WITHOUT preventing others from discovering and eventually using your secret?
Oh, I included the employee # because I couldn't believe my eyes how an open source company could make so much money to pay all these people.
You should also check out the following disturbing news: MakerBot, a leader manufacturer of open source 3D printers whose founders were always encouraging open source, has decided to CLOSE source its new 3D printer model. One of the reasons is because of a guy who decided to CLONE their 3D printer in China, and sell it on Kickstarter at lower prices. Many people were shocked at MakerBot's decision.
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