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

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.

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.