Slashdot Mirror
Likely Success of Internet-Related Business Models?
guess-for-success asks: "In Lester Thurow's latest book, published by HarperBusiness Books (Fall 2003), Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build a New and Lasting Global Prosperity, there is a chapter which discusses the beginning of new industries. During this time, several business models are introduced and only a few will survive. Looking at the PC industry, Commodore was the industry leader in the 1980's, but ultimately failed and went bankrupt in 1994. Successful business models such as Dell were not introduced until years after the industry began.
I now ask the Slashdot community: which internet business models they believe are going to succeed? Which companies will rise to the top? Will they be infrastructure related companies such as Cisco and even FedEx, or will they be true dot.com's such as eBay or Amazon?"
"You can find out more about Lester Thurow here. He is a professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been the Dean of the Sloan School of Business at MIT. He has three New York Times best selling books to his credit and consults widely around the globe."
Perhaps Slashdot should expand it's horizons as a place to get news and chat about current trends to something a bit more ambitious. Since many websites due either to incorrect configuration, bad design, or lack of bandwidth, seem to crash or not survive being Slashdotted. Perhaps is the time to start giving out Slashdot Awards. Those who survive being Slashdotted should have a placard on their website saying "We have been Slashdot Harddened."
Okay, lesson learned. Stay as far away from Slashdot as possible if you want your poor server to live longer than 30 seconds once an article has been posted to the front page. :) Here are some links to the images on the server that will bypass MySQL, so you can at least see them:
:)
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Prototype Cartridge
Prototype Box
Binary Image
Here's a MySLQ-free writeup we did, although many of the lnks internal to AtariAge won't work right now.
Information about 2600 Lord of the Rings
Enjoy!
Ahhh, google wins again:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games
Lots of LOTR games! Apple II, C64, Atari 400 and ST, Amiga, Acorn, etc...
-nate
A program called "Bored of The Rings" was produced for the BBC, Spectrum and Amstrad home computers many moons ago by Tolkien Games. These days it can be downloaded for emulators from here.
:v)
Oh, they did the real Tolkien Trilogy too, which can be downloaded separately via links from here. I just prefered the spoof.
Vik
Using a local cache would require Slashdot to serve vastly more data than it does now.
Serving lots of data to a large audience costs a lot of money. Linking to a site doesn't. It's that simple. Slashdot wants to save a buck.
However, one hit from Slashdot can eliminate a small site's readers for the rest of the month, if they have monthly traffic limits. Or worse. It is irresponsible to link to a small site this way.
What I don't understand is why Slashdot just doesn't start a policy of linking the actual site AND its Google cache. Let the readers choose. If Google complains, work something out with them. Some sites would kill for this kind of traffic. Use it as an asset. And stop killing the little guys.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Every time a bird flys over head, I get a Black Rider on my tail... my guess is that they are the spies of Sauron, just like in the book
and the only way we know of to get the horseman off your back is to dodge into the forest. He won't follow you. As for turning white when you press the button? I have no idea what that does either.
My guess is that you are wearing the ring, thus making yourself invisible. If you do it when the bird flies over, you don't get spotted. As to what happens if you wear the ring too much, I have no idea. Obviously (at least by the books logic), the Black Riders won't leave you alone if you put on the ring. You can also avoid the bird by going to the left screen - it won't follow across a screen jump.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Here are some screenshots:
- lotr1.png
- lotr2.png
- lotr3.png
-jfedorRoku is the high-end digital media player for HDTV buyers with money to burn. Roku was founded and financed by Anthony Wood, who made out well when he sold ReplayTV to SonicBlue. He's a rich guy selling gizmos to other rich guys, but not all startups have Anthony's resources. Here is a success story from one resource-challenged startup. Wallflower, which is also in the digital photograph display business, managed to get itself off the ground with a strategy I've seen only once before: dumpster diving.
The company makes (expensive) digital picture frames that compete with Ceiva, Digiframe, and Pacific Digital. Nothing special there. But Wallflower's startup plan was based around building its high-end products with pieces from recycled computers. To get started, Wallflower founders Mitch Kahn and Gordon Clyne bought 150 old but unused laptops from liquidators and via eBay, for $25 to $150 each. They were obsolete as workstations (most had 133MHz CPUs and smallish hard drives) but had the right pieces to make nice picture frames--most importantly, working 12" LCD panels.
Mitch and Gordon's small team disassembled the machines, mounted the displays in handmade wood frames with the motherboard and hard disk, and added Wi-Fi and their own Linux-based software. Basically, the Wallflower displays are Web servers that appear on a Windows desktop as disk drives--you put one on your network and you can just drag pictures onto it, and call up its internal home page to manage its settings. Now you have a nice big electronic photo frame to show your digital pictures, and changing the display is as easy as typing a URL into your home computer.
Frankly I can't see spending $500 for one of these things--but what do I know? Shortly after Forbes ran an article about the product, Wallflower sold out of its inventory of Frankensteined picture frames. Left with nice cashflow from its rising order volume, and needing more certainty in its supply chain than Weird Stuff Warehouse could provide, Wallflower recently gave up on the whole recycled kick and started buying components from manufacturers, the way most computer companies do.
With the new manufacturing strategy, the company is able to offer more features and bigger screens, but it had to raise its prices since these components are more expensive. Although I imagine they save a fortune in assembly costs, since they no longer have to dismantle laptops to get their parts.
There is a thriving economy in the leftover computer business. Lots of old equipment ready to be used in new and exciting ways.
I would happen to agree. Business is business. New Technology or new markets open up, if only on a small scale, all the time. The dot-coms, Commodores, etc., of the world have all made mistakes along the same general lines. They overestimated or underestimated the market, their own expenditures, etc. That being said, companies have only been around for about 200 years. Before that there were independent employers who would sometimes hire journeymen or join guilds. The American Corporation will someday fail (not an unwelcomed occurrence, IMHO). I'm more interested to see what takes its place in terms of financial structure and employment.
You need a solid plan, a solid product, and a company that can be successfully run by idiots (because sooner or later it will be). And you can't discount the role of serendipity -- for it was she that made successes out of the unlikeliest things. Take chopsticks, for example; who would have thought that a pair of wooden twigs would have caught on here in the U.S. mining colonies in 1800s (where they were invented by immigrants seeking to differentiate their new and tasty cuisine) to the point where they've actually spread across Asia and now account for 3% of our lumber exports! Or the success of the Post-It note: once thought to be entirely useless outside of the labs in which it was developed, it created a whole new 'need' in society for these notes that could be attached to things without paperclips.
At the end of the day, sometimes you just can't predict what'll be wildly successful and what will fall by the wayside. But I think if you find something unique and stick with it you've got a good shot.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Being a FedEx employee I think it's obvious which one I hope will survive.
However, massive restructuring will have to occur if this is to happen. Sure we are a market leader in margins and, as a cargo airline we have a good record of adapting new technologies, but we're still running on a heirarchy reminiscent of the generation that brought us Fred Smith. Reworking our buildings from warehouses to more dynamically creativity-inspiring circular buildings would be a decent start. We work on a hub concept. We need more creativity and flexibility in on-road route planning, more power taken from beaurocrats in Memphis who really don't get a good picture of on-road day to day activity other than pages full of numbers at the end of the day and share that power in the form of actual couriers and managers being able to make more broad decisions based on their locality. We have our own form of standards. The point is that practices that work in an inner city (which spawns the greatest density of deliveries and pickups) are completely wrong for people out in the country who may have ten to twenty stops a day.
And I'm not saying this as a courier. I'm an administrator, but I think it's very important to put more faith in our frontline employees. Unfortunately not all of the higher-ups share that point of view.
Dotcom ventures, all negative late-nineties stigma aside, are still in the realm of providing virtual services. Even if those are for real products, people will STILL want to feel like they're interacting with other people. Make it too impersonal, and you'll ultimately lose touch with your customers (and their reality). It'll be interesting to see what "they" do to reverse the trend.
Not to mention there will, in the forseable future, be a consistent and even increasing demand for companies like FedEx. As more people migrate to do their shopping online, they'll need companies like us to deliver the goods.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Folks don't want to waste time looking for the best deal - that's why Amazon and Ebay have done so well (Wal-mart too for that matter). However, I think with both companies expanding into the same territory, one will eventually fall, although it will take a while. Probably amazon.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Advertising is what keeps AOL afloat (at least for the time being). Not word of mouth. Microsoft dominates for any number of reasons, but none of them are customer loyaltyor good community relations (though to his credit, Bill does give plenty to charity).
I'm not saying that you can't make money with your method. Apple managed to stay around during the late '90s, prior to Jobs's return, largely due to fanatical customer loyalty, from all accounts. But Apple is now on the way back up (perhaps, though they aren't exactly profitable yet, if I remember right) because they've managed to expand their customer base by good, expensive advertising.
Consumers aren't exactly rational. It's cheaper for Dell to advertise how good their tech support is than actually improve it. It's cheaper for Apple to advertise how amazing their PowerBooks are than, say, bring the price within range of Intel laptops (not that I don't covet a nice 12" AlBook). You can get business through word of mouth. But you get ahead through sound business practices and aggressive marketing.
I'm speaking only of creative content, but I believe the a voluntary compensation method (i.e., tipping) is the only model that will compensate creative artists (without worrying about the problems of piracy, drm, etc).
I've cited this here already several times, but I wrote an essay for sharethemusicday.com that describes why a voluntary compensation model would work.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
You Mean Real Trusted Computing or MS's version?... The problem is there is no actual standard other than We are trying hard from the industries largest companies that are failing miserbly in areas reguarding security.
The problem with "Trusted Computing" is that inorder to come up with a standard and have it enforced, the standard would be rejected by most software companies because it would require them to open up the code and development process to outsiders to inspect for compliance with the standard.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Amazon.com is definetly the business model to follow. In the past 5 years they have been experiencing true booms in business.
I'll agree that Amazon.com is a business model to follow, if you don't mind a model like this:
1. Get open-ended financing
2. Sell everything at a loss
3. ???
4. Profit!
Now, I'm obviously not an expert, but my Googling only finds a couple of quarters where Amazon turned a profit, and the latest news is that the company's losses were almost $40 million over the last 9 months -- and that was considered a Good Thing because it was a 75% drop in losses.
When I was in Junior Achievement, they told us that successful companies made "larger profits," not "smaller losses." Amazon may not be going anywhere anytime soon, but treading water (even if you're the size of a battleship) hardly seems like a "success".
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I applaud you for your wisdom and the following is not a slam on you.
Why is it that in today's business world we label idiots like Darl Mc Bride and other CEO's as "industry leaders" or "examples of what leaderships should be" when they take the customer and ream them up the arse as hard as they can, whenever they can, yet the real business men and women have the attitude like the above poster, who seem to have scruples and are interested in doing a good job.
Why do we as a country reward assholes and ingrates by giving them job's a CEO's CTO's and CFO's or worse yet, electing them to government offices and ignore the real business professionals?
Customer service is #1.. without your customer you are absolutely nothing. Yet today's big business trend to to piss on your customer at every chance... from retail to banking (espically banking!) to services, to everything....
why?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I now ask the Slashdot community: which internet business models they believe are going to succeed?
It's an interesting question but we need to know exactly what the business model entails. Is it PURELY Internet? If this was the case, I would say Google has a good model. They managed to stand above when there were a huge number of search engines available for users. They managed to find the righ mix of algorithm coding, marketing, and selling adwords.
Same goes with eBay. Remember when there were a few different auction sites available to users? Yet eBay managed to differentiate themselves and move to prosperity.
When we define "Internet business" though, do we mean only "Internet"? No brick-and-mortar ties at all? Meaning we exclude entities such as Dell?
I think the basic formula for a successful Internet business has these following traits:
1) Be the first to gain as much market share as possible. This includes Amazon, eBay, iTunes. In eBay and Amazon's case, they gobbled up the share and let the other's die out. iTunes happened to do it by providing the most viable and easy to use music download service. Others are finally getting on the bandwagon but have to play catch up with them now.
2) Differentiate yourself. When you can stand out from the crowd, people use you. Dozens of booksellers, everyone uses Amazon because of their mix of ratings, price, one-click buying, etc. Google differentiated themselves in the beginning when they claimed to have indexed over 1 million pages. iTunes by being amazingly easy to use and by getting major labels to jump on board.
3) Ease of use. Google is damn easy. Amazon is easy. eBay is easy. iTunes is easy. Sure you can use other services, but Amazon has spent a lot of time, money, and research on ways to make their user experience easy and enjoyable.
4) Act like a normal business. Gone are the days of getting $4.4 billion for an idea with no real business sense. If you want to have a successful BUSINESS model, act like a business.
I'm sure there are more, but these four basic rules will be seen in all successful Internet businesses.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
So if anything, Amazon proves click and mortar *doesn't* work.
Amazon lost 149 million last year. Conversely, ToysRUs made 229 million. ToysRUs.com may not have made money, but it is apparently part of a business strategy that is functional. Indigo books made money last year (well, a bit anyways). Barnes & Noble made money last year ($100 million - not too shabby).
Anyways, I just find it entertaining that Amazon is being trotted out as a success in comparison with companies that are actually making money.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
When I say local networks, I mean last-mile solutions. Of course, some of the technologies involve longer distances than that -- up to the last 22,500 miles if you happen to own a geosynchronous bird. There will be opportunities outside of the areas served by the big players -- telcos and cable companies. This is a business where there are significant economies of scale, so small guys will have to win on the basis of superior service. Wireless technology is probably important, since wired solutions are CAPITAL-INTENSIVE, and will generally require permission from local regulatory agencies. Building the devices used in such networks doesn't seem like a particularly profitable business -- if there's a significant market, there's going to be lots of competition and the profit margins are probably quite thin.
There are opportunities to make money if you can provide some form of compelling content. I've always thought there were opportunities in almost any small city with a university. There are dozens/hundreds of music majors with performance requirements -- can you create and distribute a library of performances? Can you design and implement a multimedia tutoring system that connects students and tutors? Can you make deals with the local last-mile providers so your servers are close to the end user, rather than having to trust the Internet for performance and/or reliability?
Replicating a crummy business on-line won't be enough. The successful companies will be those that harness new technology in ways that make the customer experience more pleasant.
If three or four businesses will sell me a widget on-line, I'll stick with the one that can offer three features.
Response by real live people. When I have a question I do not want to waste ten minutes trying to find contact information on a website. I don't want to use webforms that try to tell you that you can only have "approved" topics. Instead I want an e-mail link that goes to a real live human being.
It's not that I mind an automated response, but it should show some relationship to my e-mail. Some companies can do that well, but many cannot. If my e-mail tells you that I've already tried the solution on your website, the I do not want an automated response telling to check your website before calling.
Especially one that says "DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL".
I want your website to have truthful information about what is in stock. I cannot imagine why any retailer would buy an on-line sales system that didn't also track inventory. I don't order anything that is on back order, and if your website can't tell me if it's in stock, I just go away.
Finally, a successful Internet business model is one that recognizes that on the 'Net business is global. I am astonished by the number of companies who seem to have no interest on the bulk of the human population that lives outside of the U.S. In particular those who seem to have not noticed the 30 million potential customers in Canada.
Your on-line business model should plan from the beginning to handle currencies, shipping, and languages from all over the globe. To do otherwise is to cut yourself off from some very large markets.
Your company may be located in Peoria, but people from all over the globe can access your website. Why wouldn't you want to sell to them??
Three Squirrels
Darl McBride - President, CEO
I'll quote:
In other words, he is good at talking people into giving him money to fund his projects. People who read Slashdot probably don't believe this, but I will bet that he is slick to the "right" people.
So, the reason why he is considered an industry leader is because people believe him when he says, "I'm an industry leader." Confidence men work the same way. Did you ever read the life story of Carlo Ponzi? Here it is The Life of Carlo Ponzi. A lot of people have heard of Ponzi shcemes, but most people don't realize that at one time Carlo Ponzi was considered, you guessed it, a business leader:
Who knows, in the future we may call something, "A McBride scheme."All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Ultimately what the Internet has provided us is communication beyond the wildest dreams of telephpony, wired or not.
/. - Started as News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters - even our beloved(hated) /. is an aggregation - a community for those who (sometimes) have no community. Without an aggregator like /. how would nerds from around the world find one another to discus important topics of the day?
A look at the big winners:
* e-Bay - Started as a way to buy and sell collectibles - now an aggregation of small vendors and casual shoppers selling 1.7 million items a DAY!
* Amazon - Started as an on-line book store with the content of your local shop - now an aggregation of just about any book in (and sometimes out of) print and available to you in a few days (or for pickup at Borders).
* Google - An index of all this Internet stuff - now an index with so much info that it has made itself a household word.
*
* iTunes Music Store - the next great aggregator - they have found a way to BROWSE music and sell it legally. A creative mix of low-tech product, high-tech delivery, on-line shopping, and off-line use (iPod).
So yeah Dell can make a few bucks on a commodity product, but the real winners are the ones who make a new market space by putting people in touch with the products or information that is more valuebale to them than what's in their wallets.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
While you do have a point about luck, you're info on chopsticks is so wrong it's funny. From EverythingChopsticks.com:
"For those really interested in chopsticks visit the Kuaizi Museum in Shanghai. The museum has collected over 1,000 pairs of chopsticks. The oldest pair is from the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907 AD)."
From chinavista.com:
"When the Chinese began to use chopsticks as an eating instrument is anybody's guess. They were first mentioned in writing in Liji (The Book of rites), a work compiled some 2,000 years ago, but certainly they had their initial form in the twigs which the primitive Chinese must have used to pick up a roast after they began to use fire."
And finally from About.com:
"The honorable and upright man keeps well away from both the slaughterhouse and the kitchen. And he allows no knives on his table." (Confucius)
While I don't share Confucius' abhorrence at the mere thought of a man in the kitchen, his dislike of knives is more understandable. Confucius equated knives with acts of aggression, which went against his non-violent teachings. Some experts credit Confucius' influence with the widespread adoption of chopsticks throughout China. Scholarship had triumphed over the warrior lifestyle.
Chopsticks were in use by the Shang dynasty (1766 BC - 1122 BC). In fact, the first chopsticks may have been twigs used to spear a roast cooked over an open fire. The enduring popularity of chopsticks may actually be linked to Chinese cooking methods - before stir-frying the food is cut into tiny pieces, making them easy to manipulate with a chopstick."
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
The final blow was when in fall of '93 Mehdi decided to build a few 10's of thousands of the new (AA/AGA) machines (A1200, etc), and 300,000+ of the old chipset-based machines (A600). Needless to say, the old machines didn't move off the shelves very fast at Xmas, and that was the final nail.
There were other instances like that too. Mostly it was caused by not following up on successful products (C64, A500, to some extent A3000) and trying to milk them for too long. The A1200 was the right machine; it was just too late by a year or two. Engineering had it's issues too, in particular biting off more than we could chew on the total redesign of the chipset which was never quite finished ("AAA"), and not giving enough attention to the potential high-volume products, though in general engineering was pretty focused on them.
It's tough when the CEO won't let marketing talk to engineering directly, and insists all contact go through him and his cronies... Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Commodore engineer from these times, and after bankruptcy was declared, we burnt Mehdi Ali in effigy in my backyard (literally).
You're right: those results aren't great -- and I don't even have any idea who Suzy Orman is. :-) When you see bad results like this, please take a minute to click the "Help us improve." link down at the bottom of the page and say what was wrong with the results, (e.g. in this case they were all links to other "search" sites or shopping sites rather than to a definitive source.) Google does read the feedback from that form and use it to tune the search criteria over time.