Dotcom was significant because it said that the old business rule was bullshit. Old thinking went you could either be nice or you could make money.

    For a brief time in our culture, that all changed. It turned out that you could be good to your consumers and good to your workers and everybody could have Herman Miller chairs and make scads of money.

    And, for a while, it worked.

    I want to put the blame on the Investing Public as a whole, but that seems like a cop-out. Dotcom was diseased from the inside. One by one carpetbaggers and snake oil salesmen moved in.

    The initial wave had been comprised of people who believed that a thing could be done because they had the force of will to do it.

    It wasn't coercive either...not at all.