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

Why .Coms Don't Work

[DickPhallus]

Hmmm.... well if we keep slashdotting all of 'em, they'll never stand a chance! bwhahahaha!

no shit?

[garcia]

I was going to write about what everyone already knows (capital, pointless product, worthless hype) but we all know it so.

No shit it won't work.

Piro misses the real reason, get the economists

[jpmorgan]

Piro misses the real reason as to why .com failed and why they're going to continue to have a rough time. Want the real answer? Ask an economist, the good ones were warning people at the start - they just chose not to listen.

There's two arguments as to why .com's should be successfull:

• Lower costs
• A larger customer base

As everyone knows now (at least, everyone should know by now), both of these arguments are flawed. As such .com greats as etoys.com discovered, when conducting business on a website, the website isn't the overriding expense. Amazon is now making money, and it really has little to do with saving some money hear and there on their network operations, they're making money because they streamlined their warehousing operations.

What about a larger customer base though? All the internet does is make it easier to trade - making it easier to trade doesn't mean you'll make more money, it means you'll get more and vigourous competition. Sure, people are resistant to paying for something they used to get for free, or at least for less, the car manafacturers have known this for years, but ultimately the problem is that for most of these services, it's so easy to enter the market that there's too much competition for anybody to make money, no one can run fast enough to keep ahead of everyone else. Sure, there are some highly innovative companies who can (for example, Google), but for the most part this is true.

Will .com's make money in the future? Sure, Amazon.com is making money, so is Google, so are a few others. Will e-retailing ever, as a whole, make the kind of money that was promised? No, it's just simple economics, the kind we were told for years and happily ignored because the economists just 'didn't get it.' So who did history prove to be the idiots who 'didn't get it'?

No wonder I couldn't....

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

read the fucking Wednesday comic it's getting slashdotted.

Guess I'll read it tomorrow.

Yeah, this is trollin'

[Apreche]

But Piro is an angsty pedophile. He needs a serious whuppin'. The only credit I'll ever give him is that he can draw well. Largo + Dom are cool. Stick figure dom is GREAT. The comics that Largo writes with L33t and gaming are great. But the main story line with piro and his angst suck. I wouldn't listen to a word that man says. You trust a man about internet issues when his talent is drawing sad high school girls in snow? Gimme a break.