[nateoearth]

Did the startups fail because people were stealing intellectual property? (For example, by illegally obtaining trade secrets, such as proprietary source code.) Or did they fail because they were unable to create offerings that customers valued above the cost to produce them?

Until the United States economy no longer recognizes intellectual property rights, this is a critical distinction, whether we're discussing books, music, or proprietary software and hardware designs.

[cercatrova]

I used startups as an example, what I'm really criticizing is the notion that simply working hard means something is valuable, which it's not. I could have just as easily used the example of rolling a boulder uphill. Don't extrapolate the a analogy onto the original book argument, they are not connected when I wrote it.