LETTERS

Entrepreneur, June, 2000

SPECIAL DELIVERY

I have a comment regarding "You're Invited" ["Web Smarts," April]. Robert McGarvey did a wonderftil job with this article. The best things in life are free. Recently, I've been sending many online greetings to my friends. I came across this article and noticed that not only am I able to send online greetings to friends, but also invitations. So instead of sending memos to everyone for a meeting, why not send an online invitation?

Also, I run my own business, and it's hard to keep track of all the billings--and it's especially hard mailing them out. After reading this article, I discovered that redgorrilla.com e-mails invoices to clients for free.

Farrah Gorou

San Diego, CA

FCG007@aol.com

GET OUT, ALREADY!

I have another prescription for the health insurance headaches of small businesses ("Poor Health," April): Get out of the health insurance business!

Offering health insurance in lieu of salary crept in around World War II as a way of getting around wage caps. Businesses don't pay for care insurance, life insurance, disability insurance--why health insurance? Why not reward employees the old-fashioned way--with money? More important, each business is required to be a de facto manager of a piece of the healthcare system. Modern health care is too large and too complex to be managed in this way. We need to join every other industrialized nation in the world and have a coordinated, planned, universal health-care system for all our citizens. Small businesses in Canada don't have to worry about running their own separate health-care systems.

William Ulwelling, M.D.

ulwelling@aol.com

GET REAL

Everything in your magazine is dotcom or e-mail or Web site. Are you now a PC publication? What about traditional business methods and firms that survive the old-fashioned way? Many of the high-flying e-mail/dotcom firms are not going to make it, or will shrink. Even the head man at Amazon. com says the best reality is still the physical world.

Dan Prescott

Always Ready Translation Service

language@worldnet.att.net

Editor's response: Sure, we report a lot on the tech businesses. We have a duty to--they're the hot thing of the moment. Time, Newsweek, People, etc., have been reporting on Eli[acute{a}]n Gonzalez for six months solid, and they're still called "news" magazines rather than "Eli[acute{a}]n Gonzalez" magazines. There are entire sections of Entrepreneur that are devoted to such topics as management and marketing, and are aimed at traditional as well as tech businesses, but tech businesses are still new, and the information yet to he published for the business owner is enormous.