programmer – your point is well taken, but it ought to be unnecessary as well. Of course there’s some little space where not just a victorious redeployment but also a desperate retreat must be planned. But when the public debate is over the exit strategy? Especially when things are going well? That’s bad.

I worked for a dot.com for a while just before the big giant ka-boom; its business plan was in fact just an exit strategy, as so many of them were: how much we could sell out for, in a timeframe of less than three years. In even blunter terms, how much we could convince some patsy we were worth, without ever having generated a penny’s worth of demonstrable value. The answer in our case was… diddly. Retreat!!