Last week came a very peculiar e-mail, from an old and trusted friend whose judgments I have long valued and whose recommendations are informed by insight and experience.
There was no text – just a link. It led to the web site of an enterprise in Canada, offering remarkable discounts on an extensive array of exotic pharmaceuticals – mainly those promising cut-rate prices for exceptional enhancement in male potency and performance.
The note had multiple addressees, so it was evidently not a well-intentioned if gratuitous extension of concern for my personal functionality, satisfaction and well-being.
To pursue my second thought, I wrote my friend to ask if the site was being flogged as an outburst of his own endorsement and enthusiasm. His reply identified the third and real possibility – his long-standing AOL e-mail account had been high-jacked, and under hostile influence was engaged in stealth marketing beyond his control.
I have deliberately kept my distance from AOL for some years – first because a company capable of so thoroughly bungling its tie-up with Time Warner must suffer a fatal infection in its vision and its maladroit execution. But right at home, AOL’s long history of service lapses had finally ended with its sudden and irretrievable termination of my whole family’s portfolio of accounts, without so much as a word of explanation or a hint of assistance or apology.
So I have had a definite lack of interest in the recent kerfuffle over AOL’s bleeding of its declining but remarkably durable dial-up customer base to fund its $ 315 million acquisition of Huffington Post – a project of great enrichment to Arianna Huffington herself, if not to the cadre of free-lance bloggers who toiled without for years without compensation, to enable a generous pay-day redounding to her benefit alone.
On all this background I wrote my friend again, suggesting it was well past time he acted on his long-held awareness, that monthly AOL subscription fees were a wasteful expense drain for an inferior product that had long since been over-taken in the marketplace, and also that he had just experienced the last-straw disruption and inconvenience commonly inflicted by an outmoded service, pernicious in its obsolescence.
As for extending the metaphor -- where have we heard this before?
The answer of course is that for the last twenty-five years, nothing but in-bred regulatory inertia and supine user acquiescence have propped up the standard auditor’s report on a financial reporting model that is no less obsolete than that of AOL.
Nobody reads an audit report – nobody attends to its commodity language. No transactions of significance turn on its content, which can be purchased without qualification by any company short of bankruptcy, no matter its dubious reputation or parlous condition. No candid banker or institutional investor, claiming to act in other than a herd-oriented role, will admit to laying value on a document behind which individual due diligence is obligatory.
While on the contrary, retail investors lack the time, tools and expertise to de-construct the arcana of financial reporting standards too complex and multifarious for the comprehension of mere mortals.
Finally, the costs to consumers are indirect, buried far from view and only moderately painful. And with self-interested players having their own reasons to prefer a system subject to their gaming, the indifference of the sluggish acts like gum in the gears of evolution and innovation.
The death of AOL’s dial-up business has been an inevitability ever since it became common knowledge that the cost of internet connectivity would approach zero. So came the recognition by CEO Tim Armstrong, that evolution for the sake of survival was least expedient. Whether achievable, time will tell -- although the immediate post-merger firing of 900 AOL employees suggests an imminent re-play of the old maxim that a strategy of “shrinking to greatness” is next to impossible.
As for the equally obsolete model of financial reporting and assurance, the spam being broadcast to user communities in the form of traditional annual reports and auditors’ opinions remains unchecked, if only for the moment.
To paraphrase the health warning on my friend’s inadvertently intrusive Canadian web site – seek immediate medical relief for any audit report that generates excitement lasting more than four seconds.
Thanks for joining this dialog. Please share with friends and colleagues. Comments are welcome, and subscription is free and easy – both at the Main page.
Comments