The McNealy Problem
[…] The last thing the cynic is thinking with the McNealy problem is that we are using the past as a guide with Microsoft and Cognizant Technologies (the past) to look at DocuSign (the future). We are also speaking to financial euphoria that we haven’t seen since the late 1990’s, when Scott McNealy was the CEO of Sun Microsystems. The cynic would say that those past instances are irrelevant and you must look at how great these companies are. They will utter the four most damaging words known to investors: it’s different this time. Let us not forget this is an American specialty. “As the nineteenth-century financial writer William Fowler observed, ‘Imagination in this country, lives in the future rather than the past.’ Only in America could a man declare that history was bunk.” This is the McNealy problem.
