Tell It Like It Is

The cynic will tell you that all of those stockholders who've watched their investments halve in value these past few months deserved what they got. Who hasn't heard, “Buy low, sell high”? Anyone honestly surprised by what's happened had no business casting dollars into a market so bloated that it didn't really need them. Now, investors so shortsighted that they all might as well have been day traders are licking their wounded dot-com-loaded portfolios, claiming to be stunned by what has transpired.

Give me a break. And welcome to my rant.

The tragic nugget of misimplication in all of this is that technology is just not “happening” the way we'd been promised it would. In fact, the dot-com crash could set back consumer confidence in technology — including new niches in public wireless communications — most undeservedly.

Blame the dot-coms for this? Hardly. Give someone an inch, he'll take a mile. Give someone with even a semi-marketable idea an IPO, she'll take your $350 million in funding, even if the idea probably is only worth about $3.5 million. No, it's those very technology embracers who caused this: E*Trade subscribers spending two hours of company time each morning reacting to the subtlest insinuations of hope or hype on Yahoo message boards. These are the culprits who built a false 18- to 24-month economy on unreachable expectations.

In that brief time, we have become a culture of “telling it like we wish it would be” instead of “telling it like it is.” Now we pay the price with another kind of false economy: a recession that isn't really a recession.

Now that I have established that the investor is to blame, wouldn't it be a relief to see a CEO — one no-nonsense man willing to bear the consequences — deliver a realistic (not pessimistic, but realistic) dressing-down at one of those quarterly shareholder soirees? Something along the lines of:

“Shame on you. This is a smart, established company with a modest product line positioned for steady growth. Reasonable growth in what common sense — not impenetrable fund-manager intelligence — tells you is a socially embraced industry segment. Reasonable growth equals reasonable returns. We can't all be Microsoft stock in the late ’80s, OK? So get over that.

We don't accept the burden of making you a millionaire several times over. Our goal, based on a sound business plan, is to make you a profit in line with the profit we make for ourselves.

And, by the way, if you bought stock in the venture that sold Dog Chow online, then charged customers $3 to ship it, you're just foolish. That's not a case study in how online content or technologies have no future.”

Ah, how liberating that would be.

Even companies that deserve investor confidence — providing products and services in wireless ventures that make perfect “future common sense” — have struggled in recent months. AT&T Wireless (www.attws.com), Palm (www.palm.com), Cingular (www.cingular.com), Verizon Wireless (www.verizonwireless.com), AvantGo (www.avantgo.com), Nokia (www.nokia.com) — just a handful of examples of wireless players whose CEOs should be customizing that tell-it-like-it-is speech.

It's guaranteed to top the business headlines the next day. Let some of your investors get mad and sell off. Those who do weren't your champions. They were your enemy.