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The Art of Failure
H316 writes "On the BBC web site, I saw an article on an art exhibit about the art of failure. The exhibit is entitled "Dot-Gone." Here is a great example of why the net still has so many issues; this is an interesting story, but we get friggin' thumbnail sized pictures of the artworks. And only a couple of them at that. There's some clever stuff there, but a dozen hi-res photos would have made me extremely happy. That said, the story is really bandwagony (its as trendy today to rip on dot coms as it was 1.5 years ago to write about Linux, of course I'm biased ;). I'd actually like to see this show tho, some of the works sound interesting. Woulda been nice if they showed them to us. I guess I could reconstruct the business card one using all the business cards I keep in a fishbowl saved from tradeshows.
Hello, I stopped in for opening night at the gallery. It was mobbed, but I couldn't tell how many people worked at dot.coms or whether it was just art social event. One wall was covered with business cards that had a hole punched out and attached to the wall with a hook (dot gone, get it? ha ha ha). Many of the business cards where from companies that doing ok (I can only remember Red Herring, but there were others). The graphic design that went into the cards for logos was quite interesting. No commemtary or comments on any of it. There were some silkscreens halftones of supposedly famous dot com CEOs above a water cooler. I didn't recognize any of them and I could find any labels. The other wall had a couple of "cubes" with aeron chairs. The computers had something on them, but it was too crowed to see. It was a small show and I know they were rushed to get the gallery space cleaned up and organized. Hopefully, they'll add more to it since they have a good idea.
See the gallery and the (bay area) artists themselves. ('ware Flash!)
Actually, this was all in The Standard a couple of months ago...
The more dot-coms that go under, and the more people cast aside, the better the future will be. All those people need to do something, because they gotta eat. Probably quite a number of them will try their own businesses, and some of those might very well be the next big thing. It's similar to what happens when a big employer leaves town. Here in Austin TX, Texas Instruments left town years ago leaving a lot of really smart people without jobs. It's not a coincidence that a lot of those people started their own companies soon after that, contributing to the tech boom in this town.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I'm in SF too. I'll tell ya...
I moved here in August 2000 to take on a sys admin job. It was still pretty bustling then.
Every where I looked I thought I was looking at Armani models and shit. Stupid me, I'm from out of town, my gear was shitty, and everyone thought I was in some low position because I wasn't "director of pig fuck".
8 mos. later, and director of pig fuck has his $500 for 500 business cards pressed on your typical whiny San Francisco "I'm intellectual b/c I'm from San Francisco" pseudo-art exhibit where where the funny hair dyes stand out b/c the pussies are too scared to get tatoos, piercings and look really counter-culture.
8 mos. later, and I have a job. I didn't know sys admins had it so good. We're the first ones hired (me) and the the last ones fired (also will be me). So all you marketing, purchaser, HR, bla bla blas from Berkeley, Stanford, and *worse* you blue blood immigrants from Boston, you'll see me on my beat down motorcycle with messenger bag, a laptop, conspicuous tatoos, piercings and no degree, and I'll be seeing y'all at the unemployment line. Wave when you see me!
*I'm bitter because these cheesy posers wanted to be rock stars by starting an internet version of an ice cream truck, and they really thought they were rock stars*
...they where talking about this...which I thought was pretty good art.
It's similar to what happens when a big employer leaves town.
Although there is some truth to that statement; sometimes the loss of a big employer kills the town too. When the Big 3 and AC Delco closed plants in Flint, MI the city went into a downward spiral of which it has not recovered. Many other factors play a role in the analogy that you are making. I just hope you are right that this will lead to bigger and better things!
Oh wait - it is.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Why? Businesses come and go all the time. Most startups fail. It has always been this way. The only difference is that many more dumb startups got funding (and huge PR) in 1999-2000, and now more of them are toast now.
Here in SF everyone wants to dump on the dot-coms, because they brought too many of the "wrong" (smart, educated, young) people into a city that the locals think is exclusively theirs. Certainly many of the stupid startups were a waste of time, money, and office space. But you have to put up with a lot of failures to get the diamonds in the rough.
So while I think it's fun to make fun of the bad ideas, we shouldn't forget the good stuff. Think of the auto industry: 100s (maybe 1000s) of companies have failed between the invention of the auto and today, but autos got vastly more reliable by 1950 than they were in the 1920s - in no small part because of this innovation.
Tech is no different.
sulli
RTFJ.
I think Warren Buffett said it best in his annual report:
The fact is that a bubble market has allowed the creation of bubble companies, entities designed more with an eye to making money off investors rather than for them.
And people bought into this. So fools and their money were, in the classic style, parted.
sulli
RTFJ.
"Fail faster to succeed sooner."
Screwing up is inevitable, but the sooner you do it, the faster you know which paths are unsuccessful. For example, Thomas Edison knew over 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb.
just a thought.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Speaking of the so-called .coms, why didn't any of these giantic companies understand that they were spending millions to build the equivalent of a mail order catalog? I think the .com fiasco demonstates just how stupid the average business exec is. Are these people just completely out of touch with reality? The business world must be a lot like Hollywood - the people are clueless and they base their decisions on what the current trend is.
"We will sell 20 pound bags of dog food on the internet. That makes sense."
Now, I'm not some trendy dot-com basher. I've been trying to tell people this for 6 years. I'm sure most of slashdot is in the same boat, because it's obvious to anyone with half a clue. But I just want to know, once and for all, what were these people thinking?
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
Yeah, lots of dot.gones, the commute's not so bad, but might be more related to Spring Break than cuts and closures. Still, the word was 8,500 going from Cisco, yet they still want to build some massive tech campus in Coyote Creek.
Puts me in mind of a spinner we used to have for an NT server for Notes. The server is:
Up | Down | Up | Down | Up | Down ...
Would have been nice if they had given the address, here's a link in The Standard along with some other amusing stuff.
Address is: 3316 26th, San Francisco, CA
www.lairoftheminotaur.org
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
To mourn a valueless economy with an artless art project. I dot-commiserate.
Well, part of the idea is that nobody does...and nobody should have to. I mean, you go to the Met or the Whitney to look at paintings, right? But you never, ever consider that you'll be able to absorb them all...art is just too real, just too detailed, just too large. Online art needs higher resolution than is currently available to even approach the offline experience...which, luddites aside, is what it should do. Online exhibits are much cheaper to maintain and offer no possibility of ruination for the original work, which makes them a beautiful alternative to expensive print reproductions and art exhibits which have viewing hours and limited space. Besides, two gig goes fast...consider 600 meg of mpeg-1 video clips at 1500 kbit each, another 250 meg of 600 kbit DivX clips and about 50 meg of rm "thumbnails", and hakf of that is gone already. Now combine that with those high res images I mentioned. What you have in your hand is a lot of space, taken up mostly by your higher quality choices -- choice which, as I've mentioned, is necessary to give digitized medium a "real world" feel.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Somewhere in the last two years' rush to the internet, the concept of the image got lost. It used to be easy to find lots of pictures online -- almost every site was full of high res pictures of products and so forth. Then, around the time Akamai came out, IT people realised something: images robbed bandwidth. After all, did it make sense to have a nice 64k image taking up your server's time that would be better spent rendering a page or handling a credit card transcation? Well, it might -- to those of us still adjusting to the internet-as-money-maker concept, or anybody who really lives for content. But nowadays, it's almost impossible to have a really nice gallery of images. Consider this: one high res 2.3 mpixel (1800x1600) jpeg image with low compression takes upwards of 800k with no compression and 230 with plenty of it. Shrink it down, and you can fit it under the magical 60k mark, but you lose all your res and pick up a lot of block noise. The solution, of course, is the thumbnail -- but it's not complete. Thumbnails take time and a moderate level of knowledge to generate, and they take up space. 10 truly high res graphics of the type i described above, plus their thumbnails, plus an intermediate size for the poor suckers on dailup, and you're looking at 10 meg. Consider also that many servers are still charging webspace at a 1996 rate (at least, I haven't found one yet that would accept my site's 2 gig of mpegs, jpegs and tfifs without charging me at the ultracorporate rate of $500+/month), and it just doesn't make any sense to take your not-for-profit personal page or motion media show-off site and bring it online. If you do bring it online, you're stuck either paying a lot of money (thus forcing you to accept advertisements and bastardize all your hard work or beg for money) or reducing your graphics and media to heavily compressed closed source solutions like asf or rm (notice i didn't say asx or rmi...saving art should be the right of the browser).
Hopefully, somebody out there in the hosting world will realise that the death of the VC funded dot com will require a reduction in hosting costs to survive...or the invention of clever pricing plans to allow us spacehogs that don't push much bandwidth to colocate with bandwidth eaters with no space requirements, e.g. the drudge report.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
What I would like to know is, who will be the first to create an online "Hall of Fame(shame)" for the Internet.
Would be nice to reminisce about the failures that plagued the late 90's and early millenium. It could also provide a framework for newcomer businesses to reflect on some of the failures that plagued some of the dead.dot.com's, and how they can avoid going that route.
It's rather sad to see businesses go down, since it shows us that nothing is secure, nothing is given/free, and we shouldn't take anything for granted when dealing with the technology field.
Personally I also think its a huge wake up call to remind many, the Internet is not a neccessity no matter what arguments you care to give, life worked fine without it in the past, and life will continue to work without it, although it has made things better, its still not a fundamental need in life. (not yet at least)
who'd of thought?
360 degrees of Karma
Maybe you may not think the ideas were so great, but others may have seen things from a different perspective (obviously which is why they invested).
Dot.com companies weren't limited to just San Fran, in fact many of the realty companies out here in New York City paid companies to leave so they could move in dot.com co's. In fact many districts including the meat market district (very trendy for models and glamourous types) started becoming something of a dot.com have for many companies, and many bitched about it.
Why should anyone bitch about whom moves where, as long as its in a positive effort. Such fickle minded idiots especially when these dot.com companies often paid the most money for their office space, and I'm sure their employees brought a substantial amount of money into the commnity via way of purchasing food for lunhc, gas, etc.
going out of business
360 degrees of Karma