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Enron not done none
The main problem with Enron is that it has never produced much of anything in the way of either goods or services... Bull crappy panties. Thank you for putting me in the position of defending this heartless, horrible firm. In fact, Enron has thousands of employees who do things every day: they own PG&E (Portland Gas and Electric in Portland, Oregon), several pipelines, and a few related firms that make power. As much or little of an environmentalist as one may be, we all live and die by electricity and gas. Enron was trying to transform itself entirely out of owning stuff into owning the price of ideas, and that was (thankfully) the last stupid part of the failed dotcom revolution. If Enron had succeeded in fooling people for another year, they would have divested (and reaped billions upon billions) all of these physical assets; PG&E's sale was alread underway. Of course, just as Miliken and Drexel Lambert turned junk bonds into a dirty word that, 10 years after their start, was forgotten and junk bonds are reasonable convertible debentures, so, too, shall Enron's ideas of derivatives probably get taken up by firms that can actually do something with them. There's some good ideas in making derivatives of the ebb and flow of instantly perishable commodities (electricity, bandwidth, etc.). They just weren't doing it right. They were basing their business on screwing around, not on actually hedging their bets. For instance, there's a good point in Cable and Wireless having a hedge investment that would allow them to buy 100 Gbps in 2 years at price $X, especially if their internal projections put bandwidth at 2 times $X. Perhaps they have to pay a small premium for this right, but it's a valuable tool for balancing risk in larger companies. That's exactl why futures markets are so popular: they get used by speculators as arbitrage, but mostly by firms that are trying to make sure they are acting resposibly even if the tides of fate turn against their prognostications.
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