Stories by: Michael Cusumano

Entrepreneurs and managers who want to create a software company or expand their operations and sales overseas need to understand what they're facing in different countries.

I just returned from a three-week trip to Asia, including nearly a week in India, and I can report that the Internet startup craze is alive and well in Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand and India. Most impressive, though, were the achievements and potential of India's software industry.

Many great companies have two key founders or executives who have complementary skills. In Japan, for example, legend surrounds the duo of Soichiro Honda, the engine-design genius and racing enthusiast who founded Honda Motor Co. in 1946, and Takeo Fujisawa, the one-man marketing department who became his partner. In the U.S., we have Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

There has been much ado recently about the open-source movement following the success of the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server. However, Netscape's sorry experience with open-source software development - it has yet to finish the next version of its browser - reveals how messy this approach can be for a public company.

Iridium has been on my mind since a reporter called the other day and asked, "How can smart people make such bad decisions? How often does a debacle like Iridium happen?"

I keep getting this sinking feeling that the Internet has unleashed not only tremendous entrepreneurial creativity, but also tremendous entrepreneurial mediocrity. How else could so many unprofitable businesses become household names? How else could wanna-be entrepreneurs with no hope of succeeding in regular competitive marketplaces form so many new companies? How else could we have such highly credible people, such as Dr Everett Koop, the former US surgeon general, and Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN's Moneyline, trying to become instant Internet multimillionaires?