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.

Comments

I'm cheering

[PD]

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.

Re:I'm cheering

[PD]

You're right about that. I moved here in July 1999, and it took me 20 minutes to find a job (not exagerating).

I switched jobs in February and it took a whole 2 days to find a job. That's absolutely outrageous, and is a sign of how terribly rough things are right now.

Not always... -Flint, MI

[Dman33]

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!

Don't discriminate against failed dotcoms

[bonzoesc]

Their lack of business is in no way caused by their incompetence, their frivolousness, their greed, and their failure to plan.

Oh wait - it is.

Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate

I'm in SF but won't go see this

[sulli]

I saw the writeup in the Chronicle. But even though I work in the old dot-com district (South of Market) and am in the tech business (for an established company), I don't think I'll bother with this show.

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.

What were those people thinking?

[sulli]

I think they were mainly thinking: "Hey, there's VC out there, let's get some!" Since the downside wasn't perceived as very high (so what if you fail?) and the upside appeared huge (remember Amazon at $400?) otherwise rational people went and did it.

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.

Dot.Coms huh?

[ageitgey]

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?

Fitting

[vodoolady]

To mourn a valueless economy with an artless art project. I dot-commiserate.

The sad fate of images...

[dasmegabyte]

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.