Amen.
The jig has been up for quite a while, and fear is just now beginning to emerge. Wonder if there would ever be an investigation of collusion between RH and others, allowing him to bail while leaving everyone else high and dry? After all, he was such a good false Messiah. Creating a good company at the time granted, but so did hundreds of other companies and CEO's in the mania on the way up, taken along on the coattails in a frenzy of "pro forma" earnings promises. Good company is not synonymous with viable business model, especially when valuations were thrown to the wind. As investor extraordinairre Uncle Paulie delivered his windfall into RH's Halloween stocking, nothing more needed to be done. No branding to speak of happened after that date, the GNET stock price went nowhere in the midst of the greatest stock meltup of our lifetimes for 6 months from fall '99 - 4/00, no serious analyst coverage was courted, no major initiatives that captured the public attention were put forward, promises were broken, (i.e. "set top boxes by June 2000!!!") and the amateur sleuths were all left to their own devices to try and investigate the intentions and focus since the company was unwilling to put out any news itself.
All of the postings, all of the promises, all of the amateur investigating of, did not matter one bit after RH decided to take the money and run. Insider sales were an early clue. No one will hear from the former GNET braintrust for a very lonnng time, if ever.
Of course, there will always be a few diehards who will never accept that they were had, they still to this day cling to the belief that RH, Savoy, Keester, etc. and of course myriad current and former fellow cheerleaders always think of them personally as nice little cartoon hearts of hope and best wishes float up, as they cuddle up under their warm blankets each night. They truly think this was an avoidable situation and the signs were clearly not there going back to late 1999. Hear no evil, see no evil...
Now a scapegoat is needed, and that happens to be Naveen.
All he wanted was the leftover pile of cash, he could not have been so silly as to think the jumble of sites he was saddled with along with the cash would have been self sustaining money makers, as the signs were all over Wall St. that the portal and content bubble was already over. The mantra will continue here however, "It was not RH's fault!"
As if someone forced him to slack off after the Uncle Pauly infusion, and force him to sell off and retire. Dedication and loyalty apparently only runs so deep! |
