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To: Dale Baker who wrote (29198)	1/22/2013 9:39:16 AM
From: IngotWeTrust	Respond to of 32936

An excellent point, and an elegant option you posit, Dale Baker. T/Y I think a "employee buyout" or as you posit in this case SI contributors as a co-op buyout would have been an elegant solution. It is my life experience, anything "run by committee" has never produced anything but chaos and hard feelings before all was said and done. We as a forum would have experienced rough waters for a spell as all that got worked out. There are a lot of egos around here, mine included. I suspect all of said "co-op founders" would have wanted to be Admin. Having been unpaid admin of several forums in the last 20 some years, I've ended up absolutely HATING the experience. I would have wanted to be one of the silent partners with no admin responsibilities in such a scenario as you posited. And, you are absolutely dead on in your assessement of "content providers by Apple iPhone owners." Thummers..........-sigh-

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29198)	1/22/2013 9:43:25 AM
From: Henry J Costanzo	5 Recommendations Respond to of 32936

a co-op buyout of SI Count me out...

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29198)	1/22/2013 10:03:41 AM
From: Bill	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32936

You make several good points here, Dale. Although, as a practical matter, it would be difficult to manage a co-op consisting of SI posters.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29198)	1/22/2013 11:48:43 AM
From: Mark Marcellus	15 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32936

Like Jorj, I'm amazed to see people on an investing site talking like a bunch of socialists. A co-op is a fantasy. Never mind that people never really did pony up in volume (and there were howls of outrage from many lifetime members) when subscription models were floated. There's the matter of the 2 AM phone call when the servers go down, and who is going to take it. If you don't have a business where people are getting paid to do that it's just not going to sustain itself over the long term. It's true that over the long term a business has to treat its customers well in order to be successful, and SI's history on that has been inconsistent. That's certainly a reason to adopt a wait and see attitude, but not a reason to trash the new owner before he's had a chance to show us what he's going to do. I would also add that taking a legacy business and changing it to attract a completely new customer base is not a particularly promising approach - if your goal is to invent something completely new, why buy a legacy business in the first place? There are ways to do this and make money. The Motley Fool seems to have found one, and I'm sure there are other options for someone who knows what they are doing.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29198)	1/22/2013 12:34:09 PM
From: Jorj X Mckie	8 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32936

I agree with most of your post 100%. But "He does not owe any of us any reasons for his personal business decisions." doesn't add up when OUR CONTENT is 99% of his business. All the other charts and flash and BS various people tacked on here never mattered a damn. SI is about the people posting, yet we the people never mattered a damn in the business planning. This is akin to saying that a nightclub would be nothing without the people who show up and drink and dance. Afterall, if they didn't show up to drink and dance, the nightclub would go out of business. The nightclub owner is providing a place for people to meet and dance. They are providing a service and a product. The people who pay to get into that nightclub and pay for the drinks are an integral part of the success of the business, but that doesn't mean that they should get free drinks. The nightclub would go out of business if that were the case. SI is a virtual nightclub. Brad & Jeff, and GNET and Bob and Brad and now Craig are providing us with a virtual nightclub where we can all gather and shoot the shit. For much of the ride there has been no charge for admittance and the drinks have been free. Management may or may not change that going forward. But it is almost certain that they will try to find some way to increase membership and revenues. Personally, from a business perspective, I think that our content is highly overvalued. I kinda poked fun at that concept in one of my posts where I addressed Craig and suggested that each of my posts should be worth a penny. Seriously, if you are going to claim that our content is 99% of the business, there should be some sort of monetary value for each post. But how would we value them? Are your posts more valuable than mine? Are messages about investing more valuable than politics? The co-op idea was another that I floated as a joke. Message board management by committee? A little slice of hell. And just think if it was a co-op of Politics for Pros folks who bought it out? or VFC. No, you need management who doesn't give a damn about the content. Otherwise this place would turn into an echo chamber and a haven for censorship.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29198)	1/22/2013 8:50:15 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	18 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32936

A few days ago I got a "real" letter (the type with an envelope and stamp) from my 96 year old great aunt. It was two pages of beautiful script penmanship, elegantly stated. I can't recall the last time anyone had communicated with me in this way. In fact, it's few and far between these days to even get emails that run more than one disjointed paragraph. Most people have since "progressed" from instant messaging to texting these days, where you are lucky to even see a capital letter or punctuation. SI is a throwback to the early days of email where one actually took the time to compose several paragraphs of thoughtful prose. The sheer volume of electronic messaging we get these days makes it impractical to spend more than a few minutes on each one lest we spend our entire days glued to a keyboard. That's why people have left message boards for Facebook, Twitter, and even the comments sections of on-line content sites. Brad figured if he overhauled the guts of SI (most of which the users will never see), modernized the hardware, and opened every door on the site to every user, the crowds he envisioned and indeed attracted in the late 90s would return. They did not. So now he has chosen to sell to someone who apparently has his own ideas of how to keep the doors open and perhaps attract further attention. I wish him good luck. Personally, I love the SI model. I also agree with the sentiment the format could be applied to other topics beyond investing. The big unknown is whether the pendulum will switch back to the message board model or whether some new paradign will take over instead and get most of the eyeballs. And, regardless of where people go, it hasn't yet been proven the best way to make big bucks from an owner's point of view. So in many ways SI is an anachronism and in many ways it's still a work in progress. Like everywhere else we patronize, as long as the doors stay open and the neighborhood stays inviting, that's about all we can hope for. - Jeff