Slashdot Mirror
101 Dumbest Dot-Com Moments
brennan73 writes "eCompany.com has posted an article called "Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest
Moments in e-Business History". There's some pretty good stuff in there, but I particularly enjoyed revisiting the predictions of how sites like BBQ.com were going to change the world. My personal favorite quote, from Henry Blodget of CIBC Oppenheimer: 'Unlike with other famous bubbles ... the Internet bubble is riding on rock-solid fundamentals, perhaps stronger than any the market has seen before.' Um..."
Everybody expects e-business to stay, and I personally hope against hope that it's true. In fact, I've practically mortgaged my future on the idea that it's true. But y'know, the sad thing is that we can't take that statement for granted any longer. Even the really good business models seem to be failing. We still have Amazon, Paypal and E-Bay? Are you sure you'll be making that same statement a year from now?
One of my favorite vendors of choice has been outpost.com and this morning's news says they probably aren't long for this world. I guess I should have foreseen that they were one of the FC's. But HOW? On Monday morning everyone says THEY understand what happened, but Friday afternoon all we have are bold predictions.
Has there ever been a similar time in business history, where an entire market segment arrived, evolved, and 99.4% perished in the space of less than a decade?
Fucked Company is a lot of fun for those who weren't fucked, and reporting on the end of a cycle is just as important as reporting on the exciting beginning of it. I just hope that at the end of this downturn we have something to work with.
We all have to acknowledge that the net *still* requires the buy-in of the general public, who aren't like us at all. Some of them are even getting tired of $20/month dialup. The blue chip net stocks are dying. There doesn't appear to be any benefit to being online. Nobody can prove that the whole thing isn't a fad. Almost everyone has had to throw their assumptions out and start over.
In uncertain times, certainty about the future is dangerous.
The story isn't even amusing, and the methodology is flawed. E-Business is here, and it's here to stay. The only fact we've seen so far is that companies that can't make money fail.
Note the structure in each of these "dumb moments".
Person x starts company y. Blah blah blah. Then, n months later, company y dies horribly.
Ooo, big surprise. Then you just pick, like, 50 people and companies, and a couple of anecdotes about each one, and figure out how long that n months is until the market collapsed. Whee, I'm a journalist now!
What is more interesting is, instead of stupidly gloating, to note which companies are still *in* business and why, rather to glibly talk about the failure of e-business. Some companies are making money, or have viable business models. Ok, so pets.com is dead. Oh darn. But look, we still have Amazon.com, Paypal, and E-Bay!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That just sums it all up, doesn't? Raise your hand if you worked for a company like that. :-)
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
I have a collection of publications from the steam and electric utility industries 1880 - 1920. Around 1900 there were thousands of suppliers of switchgear, generator, transformers, motors, fuseboxes, electric irons, etc. People were trying to electrify everything from stoves (successful) to dog walking (unsuccessful). Companies came and went with incredible speed, fortunes were won and lost, etc. Sound familiar?
Electronic communication is in its infancy, and it may well be a transition point similar to the arrival of the steam engine and electricy (MAY be). During any transition point there will be chaos, fortunes, and failures. That's the nature of evolution.
What does concern me a bit is that this time government may be large and well-organized enough to be quash the chaos on behalf of the vested interests. (can you say DMCA? RIAA?) That could stop any possible transition in its tracks.
sPh
Building a market on advertising, when your customers are primarily people who are too cheap to pay for your content, seems to be the stupidest idea business has ever had.
:)
This is BS! There are plenty of dot coms that brought in millions of dollars in advertising. The biggest problem ad-based dot coms had was 1) spending too much money and 2) expecting to always be able to raise more money.
Let's look at Digital Entertainment Network. They raised something like $100 million, and were blowing $50,000 per video episode, for a burn rate of something like $10 mil/month. The truth is, they could have spent $1000 per episode and gotten similar results using cheap cameras and cheap talent.
On the advertising side, DEN had a $10 million dollar advertising contract with people like Pepsi and Ford. Had they kept their burn rate to below their advertising pay-in, they would have been fine. And, I argue, that keeping it "real and small" ala early Slashdot would have lead to their content being more user-centric instead of more tv-esque.
iCast repeated the same mistake. Pseudo, which started in a much more controlled way, spiralled out of control in an attempt to go public (again, chasing the "easy money" that turned out not to be so).
Of course, I myself chased after the "easy VC money" after raising an initial angel round, so I understand why they did it...
Early Slashdot also had a big advantage - a highly targetted tech audience, which resulted in higher CPMs than a "consumer" site. Also a smart idea
Slashdot and a newly flush with cash Andover.net launch the Beanie Awards. After a mysterious process of nomination and voting, $100,000 is handed out for such awards as "Best Unix Eyecandy"...Video available here.
Hah, that was a hillarious night. Great quotes: "Is everyone drunk yet?" "Drink More" "IPO money needed to be spent" "Who here voted? Who lied?"
mp3.com's strategy of building something 'of dubious leaglity' and begging forgiveness later - websites aren't like white labels.
;-)
Microsoft Outlook and the plethora of viruses it spreads.
Amazon patenting One-Click shopping and therefore triggering a boycott by the geek contingent.
AOL Buying nullsoft and then watching as Justin Frankel creates Gnutella and tells the world how to hack AIM.
Some guy in ireland creating the first (free and open source too) mp3 radio software then not telling anyone about it.... 18 months later shoutcast launches and within days there are thousands of channels
ourfirsttime.com
The "Quick-click" software actually dates back to the pre-boom pre-NBC era of Xoom (or whoever).
Of course, even after flushing millions of dollars into NBCi, NBC execs were too stupid to spend any airtime marketing the thing until the realized that their portal was one step from death a couple months ago. Now there's a flurry of ads, never mind that they are shutting the thing down.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
VA IPOs
C-X C-S
The winner, in my book:
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/06/166258.shtml
The oldest story on Slashdot that can still be accessed:
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000004.shtml
(I find particulary amusing the comments by Rob Malda... I think that would be the first slashdot troll ever)
Reality has a liberal bias
Anyone know what they're talking about?
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Scooped by The Register, and apparently Ars, yet again. keep it up guys!
BilldaCat
Wow, when did that happen, I didn't even realize it, but its true. Now, I'm trying to remember the site that used to be at slashdot.com, and I can't :(
Andover.net acquires PT cruiser, christens it the Slashdot Cruiser.
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-Chris
I actually have been receiving dead-tree catalogues of tools from Amazon. I didn't realize it until recently, but that's pretty damn ironic.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Must've been incredibly funny. Does all the world have to view the superbowl on TV or what?
My favourite was 11 anyway.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
.. was they, in effect, didn't have a coherent business plan. Online business is the same, from a management standpoint, as .. uh, real life business -- you need to offer something new and exciting in order to stay afloat. What, I can buy clothes online? But what if I want to try them on? Yeah, never though of that, did you?
It's the same reason why I refuse to buy ANYTHING, other then things like CDs, online -- the return process is awful.
That's just my opinion, however.
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CitizenC
I just stumbled across this Dilbert strip which is relevent to this article. =)
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CitizenC
The German term "Schadenfreude" has seen a lot of play in recent months. It means, "Taking joy in the suffering of others", and it perfectly encapsulates the spirit of not only the "eCompanyNow" article but of many of the new websites that have popped up to celebrate the downfall of the dotcom economy.
,"NetSlaves" and "failure magazine" have all become the order of the day, each basically engaging in the time-honored tradition of "kicking them while their down". It is to be expected.
The eCompanyNow article was something of a cute encyclopedia of some of the greatest excesses witnessed in the midst of the tech bubble. I enjoyed reading it, and laughed out loud at seeing so many portraits of hubris and foolishness in so compact a setting. But it makes for ironic reading, considering the origins of the magazine itself.
eCompanyNow was a rag brought into existence by Time, Inc. for the express purpose of soaking up a fair share of the funnymoney dotcom advertising dollars being generated by the mania itself. But the timing was less than opportune, since they came to market in May of 2000, as the bubble had already begun its rapid deflation. The dotcom advertising budgets that had led magazines like "FastCompany" and "Business 2.0" to swell to the size of phone books were suddenly gone, and as a result, the new economy magazines have all found themselves in a perpetual state of whithering, many looking anoxeric compared to their 1999 selves.
Not all new media rags were guilty of contributing to the bubble. Some were actually attempting to do a public service by reporting on the bubble as a genuine problem that was undermining both the common sense of the investing public, and the morality as well.
"Red Herring" was somewhat lonely as tech rags go, as they constantly decried the ever-inflating bubble in 1999, even at the risk of alienating the dotcoms that were advertising in their magazine.
Consider this prescient story from October of 1999, called "Internet bubble popping American business ethics?". I admired Redherring enormously for continually bringing the bubble to the attention of their readership in the midst of the madness, when so many other tech/stock rags didn't have the stomach or brains to do the same. It takes guts to tell your readers that they are delusional and your advertisers that they are doomed, but Redherring did as much when the mania really got overwhelming.
Now, "f-ckedcompany","downside.com"
But one has to wonder, how long can the gleeful celebration of the death of stupid dotcoms last? Like vultures surviving off of the carcasses of dead and dying animals in the midst of a sudden drought, after a while, you've picked the bones clean, and there is nothing left to eat.
Kicking the recently humbled dotcom stars I guess is to be expected, but it will itself become tiresome. And then what will fuel the existence of those sites that were created solely for the Schadenfreude? Will they fail and be mocked by a 2nd generation version of themselves? Or simply forgotten? (I suspect they'll be the last to die before a new phase begins.)
And what will become of "eCompanyNow"? Soon they have have no more companies to mock, and no more advertisers to subsidize the mockery. Consolidation is already whittling the new media magazines down to a precious few, and I believe I've heard rumors that "eCompanyNow" will be merged with "Business2.0" and renamed "Business2.0". I hardly care what happens to either, given the fact that both are predicated in their very names on the myth we now have watched vanished before our eyes. There is no "Business2.0" model- that was the lie that we were being sold in the midst of the mania. There is no "eCompanyNow" model to embrace. We're back where we started, looking to the "Fortune" and "Forbes" magazines that preexisted the latest bubble and the "RedHerrings" that decried it for wisdom about what is coming.
FIN.
Ha ha, stupid eCompany! Oh, wait, who's publishing this list again? oh yeah, it's eCompany.
This was the real problem with the internet "boom" and the ensuing stock market bubble -- totally incompetent people were offering market advice, and investors were actually taking it. eCompany isn't investment news, it's a Netscape portal toy publication. The thing that makes me sick is that the investment advice is so patently horrible that they even have the audacity to mock it outright in their own publication.
Of course this isn't the first time people have gotten burned by chasing a "sure thing" stock tip from some essentially anonymous source. "Let the buyer beware," I guess. And no, I'm not bitter; I didn't personally invest in any of the issues on eCompany's little list. It's just that I know a lot of retirees who have essentially lost their shirts following investment advice like this, and from more allegedly "reputable" places, too, like cnnfn and cbs marketwatch.
What it really goes to show, I guess, is the real watermark of the internet: irresponsible journalism. With all this hype, and columnists essentially a commodity, who has time to check facts?!
Strip out any spaces and save this in your browser's Favorites bar. Hilite some text, click the bookmark, and get the most relevant hits on the planet.
javascript:q=(document.getSelection)? document.getSelection(): document.selection.createRange(); if(!q)q=prompt('Search:',''); if(q)location= 'http://www.google.com/search?q='+escape(q);Also, AutoGoogler doesn't send a continuous feed of click data back to a multinational corporation's marketing department. Your choice.
The jury's still out on Amazon, in my book. They still bleed cash like a gusher, and until they actually turn a few quarters of positive results, I'd still bet on an eventual collapse.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Redhat IPO's
I always found the most curious thing about sites generating revenue through advertising was the huge inner loops with no external source of revenue.
That is, company A and B advertise on each other's site, but both A and B derive their income entirely from advertising revenue... which only moves money around, doesn't make more. Since expenses are non-zero, and even the cost of moving the money around is non-zero, it's just a recipe for disaster.
I always wondered where the traditional advertisers were. Brand name recognition, like Coke or Pepsi, is the only thing web advertising is REALLY good for. People can only read one page at a time (even if they have several windows open) and are, in general, looking for a piece of information. Click-through advertising relies on the reader to disrupt their search and chain of thought.
I don't know anyone who would impulse buy a web server, which is what click-through really measures. Checking revenue before and after advertising is introduced is probably the best way to determine its success... unless nobody wants the service you are offering, which would cause TV advertising to fail miserably as well.
And if I punch the stupid monkey, I'm going to need to buy a new monitor. But, hey! This is the web! When I need something, I'll go find it! I don't need to be advertised to about it!
The ultimate point is - advertising in interactive media cannot divert the users attention away from the task they originally arrived at the site to complete. The Web is not TV, if you need a cliche.
Advertising is not yet powerful enough to cause everyone who sees/hears the ad to spontaneously buy the product. From that perspective, the dotcom crash is actually a victory for capitalism - the consumers have chosen, and no amount of marketing could change that.
sig fault
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I like to watch.
Hmm, wouldn't that be pronounced "Dot-dot-bomb" and "dot-dot-fortune"?
My personal favorite pronounciation is Digital:Convergence: "digital colon convergence"...sounds like a new digital ass-interface...
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
Here's what I wrote one year ago, the day Downside went online:
4.14.2000 - Today begins the Second Great Depression
Any questions?
If you're into failed .coms, head over to fucked company.com You can hear about failed sites every day.
This message was encrypted with rot-26 cryptography.
Putting all your chickens in one basket of an unproven, brand new technology type just because it's the fad of the moment. The smart ones used that as yet another diversification technique and not the entire portfolio.
Snake oil salesmen use some of the same techniques to seperate people from their money. Yes, some actually had a good idea but the SNR was rather on the noise side then too.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
One of my favorites is Ice Cream Source. For just $59.94 you can get six pints of Ben & Jerry's delivered. It seems like a wacked business model, but they seem to still be going.
Looks like the dumb dot-com moments keep on coming.
Also of note: Of all the services offered by NBCi, what generated the most buzz was their pretty spokesmodel (reminiscent of the sock puppet spokesman for pets.com, which became their hottest seller).
Hey, now there's a model for bailing out NBCi.com... nude movies of the "pick a word, click it, get information" girl.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Actually, it's more like for every 100 dot-bombs there is 1 dot-fortune. Hell, even Amazon is still in the red.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
And they already wasted a good part of their budget on their TV ads decrying (what else in irony?) TV's. "People stop watching TV when they're on Keen.com." Which makes NO sense at all. Why would the TV be complaining? They should have some guy holding up man pages in pain.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
on the mute button. Gawd, those were awful ads.
sulli
RTFJ.
In my post, for instance, it underlines "Java", "QuickClick", "NBCi", and "Scientology". Clicking on an underlined word brings up a menu with a few links. For instance, "QuickClick"'s menu allows you to download it or go to the homepage. "Java" has links to the programming language, and "NBCi" has a menu two levels thick of news, stock info, analysis, etc.
For Scientology, it has two links, both to the Scientology magazine, Freedom.
Looks like the Church beat me to the idea.
I found that you could hightlight a phrase, then alt-click on the highlighted phrase, to search on more than one word. It's a interesting idea, to feed words to a search engine from a webpage, but the auto-googler, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is a better idea.
You may have seen it. The NBCi spokeswoman walks dramatically on stage. Hundreds are in attendance, all with their own muted terminals. The screen behind her shows a HUGE display. She introduces the concept ("See a word, click it, and get information"), the people are estatic.
Every detail is perfect and hilarious.
The spokeswoman is the anti-geek - attractive, female, thinks Java is a drink, lips as red as Valentine's Day. All marketing, doesn't understand a line of code of the QuickClick tech.
She has to have an exagerated gesture for everything. The motion for "clicking" is not pointing (that was used for "seeing"), but instead Jazz Hands, or the motion of throwing away a basketball.
The people at their terminals are blasted by light as their screens turn into spotlights, or perhaps microwaves digesting metal.
One poor guy is so excited, you can see him squirming, barely unable to take his eyes off his personal terminal to ask "Any word?" He climaxes the answer, "Yes, Any Word!"
They thunder into spontaneous applause. One guy lifts his arms and face to the ceiling, as if to say "Thank You, God!" or perhaps "All Praise to the CEO of NBCi.com!"
Unfortunately, NBCi is a little late for the dot-com buzz. Still, I giggle a little everytime I see this commerical, and the thousands of cultists who dressed in their best outfits for the unveiling of the new tech.
With Scientology in the air, it even gets more interesting - old LRH's learning tech hinges on the idea that all misunderstandings are over misunderstood words. When you don't get a new subject, it is solely because you didn't understand a word (not because the material is hard, or doesn't make sense, or the teacher is awful). You are encouraged to look up all the words you didn't understand, and then you will understand.
The Church could directly license this "tech" for their own use. "Free will? What's that?" Click. "Being Clear enough to follow the teaching of LRH! I get it!" Further, the introduction of the "SciClick" tech would look a lot like the NBCi commerical, except that the spokeswoman would be replaced by David Miscavige in a sailor's outfit, with or without the lipstick.
Urgh! These clowns should go back to selling used cars.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I know it's been said many time before, but I gotta mention porn. They've been profitable since day 1 using advertising. Just try telling the owner of Persiankitty.com that advertising doesn't work on the Net!
...in any way whatsoever. It's the harbringer of the new dot.reality.
I mean, it's great to read it and keep abreast of what tech industries are getting bent over that week. If you find out that it's blocked at your company's firewall, you know to start polishing your resume!
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Uhm, I wish I was smart enough to earn browny points by reading Ars Technica and then posting submissions to /.. Only now you've been caught!
"100 Dumbest moments in e-Business history - Posted 04/12/2001 - 1:19am EST" on Ars Technica.
"101 Dumbest Dot-Com Moments - Posted by Hemos on Thursday April 12, @12:44".
This reminds me of StanLee.Net, which died recently thanks to it's major share holder and "Consultant" Peter Paul. This bastard, friend to greedy shits all over America, sold most of the stock (reducing it below $1.00) and single handedly destroying Stan Lee himself and yet another attempt to bring comics to the Net.
This is more than a 90% reduction in the stock price, within 3 days (!).
From their desks in the "bullpen", employees gasped as they watched the stock drop like a dead donkey from the top of the Daily Bugle Building. No Spiderman webs to catch that fall.
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jeff13
For every ugly website founded on millions of dollars of venture capital with a shaky business plan and appeal to at least zero people worldwide, there is another one that is just as ugly and appeals to just as few, but has more funding and no business plan whatsoever.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Building a market on advertising, when your customers are primarily people who are too cheap to pay for your content, seems to be the stupidest idea business has ever had. If you remember back in the days of 1999 (when I broke my e-business hymen with a small web company that did amazing work and made a lot of dough before being bought by a larger dotcom), everybody was about brand building, becoming the best known name in what they did. And of course, money would miraculously follow...offer the advertisers a huge name that they were plotzing to get space on. But somewhere along the line, people decided to start watching click throughs -- which was the nail in this type of business's coffin. Free content appeals to those of us who like free stuff, a class of people who aren't interested in impulse buys or leet gizmos. And of course, by the time decent content came about (and there is a lot of it around nowadays), the bottom had fallen so far out of this advert barrel for the remaining cash to spread far enough to cover the cost of truly great sites.
E-business, however, is not the same as what we call the "dot com" model. The dot com model is content for advertising. E-business is a more robust form of catalogue and phone business, which has survived for years and years before computers could count to 257.
Now, the trick is to find a way for all these wonderful content sites to stay cohesive, to make online newspapers a boon rather than a drag on print sales. The trick is to survive the stupidity of the branded marketting boom and move into an application and content model that is condusive to magnificent content but also will pay the bills. The internet has spent the past three years selling its cow for the magic bean of advertising, but it only grew into a small cactus. It's up to us -- the internet users, internet industrialists and yes even us open software paranoids -- to find a way to make the web work. I think it's going to take a lot of sacrifice -- hosting houses are going to have to drop their costs and standards will need to be opened rather than closed. Users will need to be educated in a way that benefits the 'net, because for every user tricked by a "your browser is not optimized" bar is one more who is wary of the new economy. And methods of payment will need to be found that don't require micropayments, advertisements OR goodness-of-your heart donations.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Think about the marketing that could have been:
I mean Melanie is as sharp as they come.
Is this the authentic apology from George Bush to China?
360 degrees of Karma
But it does not take hindsight to see that companies with no revenue and no coherent plan for collecting money from anywhere aren't a great investment...
Most people (myself included) hate the (almost dead but not quite dead) "culture" of the dotcom companies. Lavish offices in swanky locations just to show off and very expensive equipment and furniture for the twenty-somethings calleing themselves C*O and fast talking 'know nothing' IT pseudo-consultants. This whole farce would drive a saint to insanity. Now that most of them are titsup.com hopefully new and stable startups will keep popping up and who knows we may see the resurection of uber-cool so called basement startups(tm). Just the way it used to be in the eighties. Because you don't build a company by spending wads of money first. You build it by having a good product that people want first and growing from there. Good riddance dotcom world! Don't come back any time soon.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.