Piro On Why .Coms Don't Work

cabbey writes: "Say the name MegaTokyo and most people, if they recognize it, think 'one of the best manga/comics on the net today. (ignoring the recent 'stick figure dom' days while Piro was moving).' But few people think about the social, economic and philosophic issues the authors' rants can delve into. This morning Piro put up a rather long 'rant' that's really a catching insight into why the dot-com world didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving. (archive link to the rant in question, it's below the comic. ;) "

Comments

re: consumers won't pay for what was free

[Bill the Cat]

I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.

Offer people a good product, at the price the market is willing to bear, and they will buy it.

Value

[Mattygfunk]

The paradox here is that once people loose respect for a site, won't they be less willing to pay for it?

This statement interested me. In my opinion Google is both the most respected search engine and web site on the net (sorry /.). If Google started charging tomorrow, suppose it's $5 a month, would I lose respect for them and would I pay for it?

The answer is that no I wouldn't loose respect because I respect their product. Yes I would pay for it because their content is valuable to me.

God forbid this ever happens but it's worth considering. If you are offering value for money you won't loose respect from your users. If your content is worth $0.00 then thats the maximum you can charge.

Re:Enough about why the .coms didn't work

[nomadic]

The fact is they're still dumb. They saw that the internet was popular, and their kneejerk reaction was to try to think up a way to capitalize financially on that. They're still doing it.

Analysts come up with figures: x% of internet users will be going wireless by 200y. So they just pump millions of dollars into creating infrastructure, never bothering to look at those figures with any intelligence. How did some guy in a little office downtown come up with these figures? Surveys? Estimations? Listening to wireless company executives' pipe dreams?

Look at interactive TV. For YEARS they've been churning out one failed interactive TV venture after another. They've managed to convince themselves that people want to talk to their TV, and it doesn't matter how many times it fails, they're still lining up to make the next doomed platform.

Not everything can be commoditized, and it's a sad statement on our current culture when the first question that pops into some greedy, inept "entrepreneur" is how much can I make? Piro put it very simply and clearly; just because people like something doesn't mean they're going to pay for it, especially if they used to get it for free (it was a nice change from his usual rants, which usually run along the lines of "this strip has sucked any enjoyment out of my life, and I now live in a constant hell of fatigue and despair. I'm so very, very tired..." Wish the poor guy would realize we don't mind if a strip is a few days late.)

Internet should be renamed InformationNet

[eples]

The Internet should be renamed InformationNet and we can get this all over with quickly.

The best online ventures are the ones which provide end users access to information they didn't have anymore.

Slashdot, for example.

See, it was *built* to provide easy access to information. It's what the Internet is good at.

The Internet was *not* built to replace the shopping mall - a place which is usually entirely void of any useful information about anything.

See? It's all very simple.

Re: consumers won't pay for what was free

[Shotgun]

I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.

Ummm..No. The draw for cable TV in its infancy was watching movies without commercials (HBO), and get more than the 3 broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, CBS). Cable TV offered value above and beyond broadcast TV that I lusted for but never attained as a child. (Now that I'm grown, I don't sit still long enough to watch TV 8*)