Who owns the data?

Corporate data: lose it, and you're on your way to unplanned retirement. Put it on a laptop, and you're inviting one user to walk away with it as personal property.

One of our longtime friends from the PrePequodian Era is an incurable entrepreneur. Great vision, great imagination, a fearless businessperson with great faith in what people can do if given the opportunity. As other businessfolk do, our friend hired the best sales manager he could find, purchased a laptop for him and sent him out into the world to bring in contracts and customers.

The manager went out into the world and did his thing. He worked long and hard for our friend. He kept track of all his customer relationships on his laptop. All his correspondence and all his contact information lived on that laptop as well.

Then one day the sales manager and our friend came to a parting of the ways. Our friend collected the laptop. But where was the sales manager's data? Evidently the sales manager had subscribed to the idea that anything he worked hard to acquire belonged to him personally. He had taken the data with him and deleted it from the laptop.

Not long after that, our friend invested in GoldMine. Our single easiest selling point was that laptop users can synchronize data with data on the corporate server. That way, corporate data stays corporate data even if the laptop or the user disappears. It makes sense to us.