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."

Comments

Slashdot the 'Stress Tester'

[MasterMynd]

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."

Direct Links to the Pictures and Pictures

[TheAlchemist]

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:

Screenshot #1
Screenshot #2
Screenshot #3
Screenshot #4
Screenshot #5
Screenshot #6
Screenshot #7

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!

Wasn't there an Apple II LOTR game?

[nate.sammons]

I thought I remember having some LOTR Apple II game when I was a kid -- anyone else remember it?

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

Bored of The Rings & Trilogy - Download

[vik]

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.

Oh, they did the real Tolkien Trilogy too, which can be downloaded separately via links from here. I just prefered the spoof.

Vik :v)

The obvious reason why Slashdot won't use a cache

[Dan Crash]

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.

Re:Lord Of The Rings

[JabberWokky]

The birds don't seem to do anything (we haven't figured that part out yet),

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

ZX Spectrum

[jfedor]

A Lord of the Rings game was released on ZX Spectrum. Like Hobbit it was a text adventure.

Here are some screenshots:

• lotr1.png
  
• lotr2.png
  
• lotr3.png
  

-jfedor

Roku is a good example of a "new economy" business

[klipsch_gmx]

Roku 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.

Look to the past for examples of future success.

[Sheetrock]

There is a reason that The Book Of Four Rings and The Art Of War are recommended reading for any entrepeneur: the fundamentals never change.

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.

Both will be necessary, for a while.

[ActionPlant]

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,

Re:Both will be necessary, for a while.

[ActionPlant]

I'm very interested in your story and history with the company. In my position there'd be very little I could do to recompensate, but I came on only a few years ago and to my knowledge there have been no true layoffs since. I was under the impression our IT was, for the most part, outsourced, but of course I could be wrong (considering they operate now out of a completely different department and cost center than my own).

Our current upper management has made an attempt to put on a face to the frontline employees of consideration and a promotion of customer service; however, I have seen customer service be put aside time and again in favor of padding our numbers in order to gain a higher "service level" average within the company. I think I'm one of the only administrators who sees the irony.

Finally, we've had to do a lot of cut-backs of management itself, as well as collapse a lot of routes in order to save hours and, ultimately, lose less money over the past two years. What is interesting is that FedEx, while still maintaining that they will by no means lay off anybody, has been eliminating positions left and right. However, in order to maintain, they have kept those employees in the ledger, pointed them to our internal open-position postings, converted them to "casual employees" and told them that when anything comes up they're welcome to take it. Many of these employees have opted to resign because most of the open positions were on a lower pay-scale and often only part-time. I do admire the company's efforts though, considering that we HAVE gone through hard times (I've watched the numbers myself). They've made a stringent effort to "promote from within" even if the shuffling really isn't promotion at all, as opposed to hiring and training new employees. I know it's been tough and we've lost some people, but the truth is that we've not gone out and hired a bunch of new people (company-wide, anyway). It doesn't make your situation better, but it doesn't look as bad.

Re:My experiences with tech business trends

[KrispyKringle]

I'd say big businesses disagree. You yourself point out your small customer base; for this scale, it's far more efficient to get a few more customers by word of mouth than pay for advertising (in which, budgetwise, you cannot hope to compete). But for the large scale, it's that which really matters.

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.

Amazon? Are you nuts?

[RobertB-DC]

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".

Re:My experiences with tech business trends

[Lumpy]

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?

Opportunity exists in aggregation

[amichalo]

Ultimately what the Internet has provided us is communication beyond the wildest dreams of telephpony, wired or not.

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.

* /. - 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?

* 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.

Re:The old business rules still apply, more than e

[jesup]

Now the negatives:
* Commodore: Entered an industry well penetrated by apple, IBM, Tandy (back then) and company and tried to play along, didn't make it...

Commodore: Commodore was one of the early ones; they were out there with Radio Shack and Apple, long before IBM tried personal computers. In the mid-80's they sold over 14 million C-64's; at the time that was a stupendous number. Commodore's failing was of management and goals, mostly due to upper management who had no idea what a computer was (Mehdi Ali; a wall-street banker type) and insisted on micro-managing the company - tough when you don't understand the products.

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).