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.
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
ourfirsttime.com
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
Amazon patenting One-Click shopping and therefore triggering a boycott by the geek contingent.
Amazon.com loses money on every item they sell, so the "geek boycott" actually is SAVING them money, pushing the company towards profitability.
Do you want to hurt Amazon.com? I mean really hurt them? Then you should buy everything you that you possible can from them. Amazon lost a BILLION dollars last year. With the combined purchasing power of all the geeks on Slashdot, we could make this two billion dollars and really drive them into the ground!
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My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
.. 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
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.
Redhat IPO's
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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?
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".
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