If a company fell in the woods...
An interesting heuristic measure of the value of a company is
how much a company would be missed if it were gone? I just read about this
idea in Strategy and the Business Landscape by Harvard's
Pankaj Ghemwat. Looking back on the Internet boom, it would have been a pretty
telling question - most of those companies would not be missed if they were gone
and now they are. It's also interesting to consider from the flip side.
Companies with many complementors (like eBay) would be seriously missed if they
were gone.