karlotta said:
Oh yes, I do...
First and foremost, as has been stated as often as raindrops precipitating from a thunderstorm, [H] did no investigative reporting of any kind. When asked to tour the IL facilities and interview the principals in the company, [H] declined. Instead, what [H] did was merely to cobble together a web of circumstantial inferences obtained from a variety of public sources--such as newspaper columns, the content of which [H] also did not investigate or in any way confirm independently--and use them to spin a web of infamy around some spotty general information already made public about IL, or IL's principals, in publications other than [H]. The most amusing thing [H] did that I can recall at this date was to take IL's own public SEC filings--which were written by IL itself expressly for the purpose of informing potential investors as to the risks of investing in IL and pretend they were some kind of "expose'" of IL's secret problems--when of course the reverse was in fact the truth: IL revealed this info without any help at all from [H] or any other entity at any time. Why did IL write what it wrote in its SEC filings? Because the law requires that IL (or any other company operating in the US and seeking outside investment) reveal any known problems or negative possibilities to investors IN ADVANCE, in SEC filings, so that investors will invest with their eyes wide open.
The irony is that the IL SEC filings trumpeted by [H] as a kind of "expose'" actually prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the company never at any time mislead potential investors. Investors invested in IL despite what IL warned about itself in its SEC filings--not because investors didn't know about any of those possibilities. And that's precisely why no one can produce a list of investors stating that they were ever at any time duped by IL into investing a penny.
The cry is "investors were cheated" and yet I have not seen a single IL investor complaint to that effect. ([H] was not to my knowledge an IL investor and therefore doesn't count at all--[H] cannot claim it was ever defrauded by IL on any matter, imo.)
Again, what happened with IL is commonplace among privately held technology startup companies relying on venture-capital funding: it is not unusual or unique. The central problem with the [H] "expose" is that [H] never bothered to make that known during the course of the entire ridiculous sequence of events; rather, [H] sought only to use IL as a "personal publicity generator" for the site's direct benefit. That's the way the issue has always appeared to me, anyway.
WaltC said:
Again, there was nothing [H] ever stated that was not already public info gathered from some other source, or else that was not already covered by IL in its own public SEC filings. Hence, [H] had nothing to do with what happened/happens to IL--but would like to "take credit" in some bizarre fashion anyway, seems to me.
What I "understand" about IL is simply this: no consumers were ever financially harmed by IL in any way, shape, or form. There apparently are no IL investors who have stepped up to the plate to say they were mislead/defrauded in any way by IL. Why not, do you think?
I think it's because no investor anywhere is going to say, "Gee, I never read IL's SEC filings before I invested and so I feel cheated"...
And that's because IL issued and wrote, in accordance with the law, its SEC filings expressly for the benefit of potential investors and they all invested in IL with their eyes wide open after reading IL's SEC filings. The idea that investors were such morons that few or none of them knew IL's SEC filings existed until [H] informed them of those filings is utter nonsense. Case closed...Look, everybody knew from the start that the Phantom console, having to compete with MS and Sony and Nintendo, was highly unlikely to succeed. I knew that the very fist time I ever heard about IL's Phantom initiative, and long before the private publicity war between [H] and IL was started by [H], and before I ever read IL's SEC filings. So if *I* knew that from the start then I consider it extremely likely that most of IL's initial investors were capable of the same rational thought processes that led me to my own initial conclusions about the matter. But they are grown men and have their own reasons for investing wherever they invest and I'm certainly not going to disabuse them of the privilege of investing where they see fit. Many of these investors are more like dice rollers than prudent investors, anyway, as I pointed out in my earlier posts. As such, none of them are answerable to me, anyway, or to [H], as to how and when they choose to invest.
The difference, I think, between the viewpoint of [H] and my own concerning the Phantom was that I was willing to give IL the benefit of the doubt and [H] clearly was not.
I'll add one last comment in conclusion: where was [H] a couple of years ago when Intel was trumpeting Prescott and talking about 4-5GHz? Intel certainly "led on" its investors as surely as IL did, didn't it, where Prescott was concerned? Where was [H] concerning the years of pre-release hype generated by nVidia over nV30? Etc., ad infinitum.
In fact, as I've tried to point out over and over again, this kind of thing is commonplace in the industry: companies large and small bite off more than they can chew in terms of product anouncements they make with little more than optimism to back them up. Sometimes the optimism is warranted but sometimes it certainly is not, as we all know. Investors continue to invest in all of these companies, anyway. The one thing that mature investors know about any investment they make in any company is that it is always a risk as things may not turn out the way they hope or intend. Observing the circus of [H]'s "expose" of IL as it unfolded I have to wonder if [H] was ever cognizant of this reality. I have my doubts, I really do.
