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Last Great Internet Bubble Auction
jlouderb writes "At least that's what they are calling it. Cowan Alexander is getting ready to auction off the assets of MP3.com (now owned by CNet) on March 10th and 11th. The items up for sale include lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular, along with servers and notebooks that are probably hopelessly out of date. The best part, though -- a 1997 yellow hummer and a 1994 "Fat Boy" Harley. Plus, they've got pictures!"
Too bad they aren't selling the mp3 database itself! All those songs, lost.. there should be a law or something.
Although that Axis Systems (now part of Verisity Design) machine looks pretty nice. Hm, $1M initial price.. I wonder for how much it'll go now. We could use one at work for various things.
eden.h4xx.com - whacky free for all image board
It seemed to me that MP3 went due to the lawsuits and harrassment from RIAA, not because they had a particularly flawed business model (aside from the music sharing thing), though a Hummer, Harley, Pool table and other junk does suggest an overeagerness to burn through capital.
The items up for sale include lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs
I'd still like to get one of those, but with the price of shipping and gas being what it is, I'm better off looking for one around where I live. I could certainly use a new laptop, but there's piles of those around for cheep.
I've tried the Aeron chair out and it seemed like a decent chair, are they not all they appear?
I had one of those swedish (or whatever they were) chairs you kneel in and found my upper back became very sore, so that didn't last.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The items up for sale include lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular
Very clever, trying to convince everyone not to bid on the Aeron chairs in order to keep the costs down.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
So by all means knock the fad surrounding it, but it's pretty silly to knock a perfectly good piece of furniture just because it became fashionable for a brief time.
Who the hell is "Pootie"?
;)
What the hell is This Thing?
Does all This Stuff come with the hat and the giant Pez?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Oh, and dibs on the Rocket Ship.
libertarianswag.com
A company with that much crap with no revenues totally deserves to die. I hope the founders are in jail right now. Although they probably aren't Well then I hope they're bankrupt. But again they're probably on a beach somewhere getting a tan while earning interest on their ill gotten gains...
servers and notebooks that are probably hopelessly out of date
But if these machines have hard drivers still hooked up, then there might be lots of interesting stuff lying around on those (maybe mp3s too!)
Free XBox, PS2
According to the photos, auction items also include a few full-size arcade cabinets (no big surprise, they're pretty much a dot-com staple).
Yeah, sure, these chairs came to symbolise the greed of the Dotom Bubble, and they may be "dumb and popular", but there's no denying one thing: they are comfortable. Ask anyone who's ever sat in one, and they will agree. Definitely not worth the $750 per chair that my company paid for them at the time, but they are very comfortable.
libertarianswag.com
What in their business model suggested to them "You know, we could make a LOT more money delivering music online if me spend company funds to buy a Harley and a Hummer!"
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I'd like to amend the blurb to: "Plus, they had pictures, until they were posted to the front page of slashdot."
This comes from the ~20th comment.
Maybe if companies like MP3.com used their VC to build their businesses rather than buy Hummers, so many wouldn't have gone under. I bet you can't even listen to MP3s over the roar of the diesel in that thing...
The pricey Herman Miller Aeron chair may have become a symbol of dot-com excesses, but to call it "dumb" is going overboard -- it's a great chair. It's gotten somewhat of a bum rap because many people never take the five minutes to adjust the chair to their body shape. Once you make the proper adjustments, it's heaven. I never understood why you wouldn't properly calibrate a "peripheral" that you use 100% of the time while you're working. Treat your ass with respect!
lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular
You got something against the Aeron? I'm sitting in one right now, I've been using it everyday for years, it is hands-down the best chair I've ever plopped my ass down in.
I used to have back pains every morning after sitting a lot, and discomfort after long coding sessions, even with an alarm that I set to tell me to stand up every 30 minutes. But all that went away with the Aeron, it is a "life changer".
It got popular during the boom, like every expensive luxary item. How come you don't say "big dumb Hummer trucks", it seems like every dotcom CEO had one.
Just sticking up for a good product. I have several other Herman Miller products, including a *very* nice Eames lounge chair, they are worth the money.
I participated in the Enron auction, and let me tell you it was utterly a waste of time. The prices really were hardly less than retail value, and considering that the equipment was used (i was mostly interested in computers and lcd's) it was overpriced. What you had were lots of dumb folks out there that jacked up the prices so that nothing was really all that good of a deal or anything to be surprised about. I swear there were used 15" LCD's going for $4-500. You could buy one from BestBuy for that price last year.
I'm just really skeptical about these auctions. I found that it really wasn't worth the effort of getting registered, calling in, etc.
cowanalexander
Something is just plain wrong with it.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Yeah but Galaga & Ms. Pacman? Sheesh! And I thought I was hard up for entertainment... I appreciate the classics as much as the next fellow, but come on... A coporation might stand out with a Tempest machine, but I think if I were interviewing with a firm and I saw Galaga & Ms. Pacman, I'd like to think that the handwriting was on the wall...
Here's a quick, brief MP3.com timeline:
July 1999 - MP3.com floats, raising $344 million.
August 2000 - MP3.com pays Sony $20m in damages for copyright infringement
September 2000 - MP3.com pays Universal $250m in damages for copyright infringement
May 2001 - Vivendi Universal announces intention to purchase MP3.com
Vivendi-Universal's former chief executive Jean-Marie Messier bought MP3.com for $372m in 2001 and integrated it into Vivendi Universal Net. The rise of file-sharing, the dot.com crash and perceptions of MP3.com as a 'sell-out' resulted in the investment failing to meet its potential.
November 14, 2003
MP3.com to close
CNET has acquired MP3.com and will be shutting down the downloading service. According to an email sent to MP3.com subscribers, the site will no longer be available as of December 2nd. According to the same email, CNET is planning to launch a service in the future.
Feb 25, 2004
Complete Liquidation of 100,000 sq ft facility - 100s of Servers (Sun, Compaq, HP, & Dell) Clarion EMC Storage - 100s of PCs, Notebooks, Printers - 100s of Herman Miller Aeron Chairs - 10,000 sq ft health club - Pool Table, Foosball, Video Arcade Games, Ping Pong. Artwork, Collectable Musical instruments, Contemporary Furniture & more...
The biggest shame? They're selling the Soul Edge cabinet!
Please someone snatch that up!
This is exactly why these companies went belly up. You barely have a product in an ill defined niche with no real defined revenue stream. Yet, the company is able to build all sorts of cool little baubles, model rocket ships, framed guitars, high end ass buckets, Hummer automobiles, work out equipment etc...etc...etc... from start up capital.
This is exactly why I want to see first hand any startup company that I am interested in investing in. Field trips aren't just for grade schoolers.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The Hummer has 50,000 miles on it and it's on its second engine. What did they do to that thing?
-N
I've nothing to say here...
A tad jealous are we? My ass is nice and comfy on an Aeron.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Well, I'm glad those stupid ads that danced over the screen I was trying to look at served some useful purpose for the company.
(Aerons are great chairs, but they have one big weakness: the cheese grater effect. The nylon mesh backing is nice and cool in warm weather, but in the winter when it's tool that mesh shreds sweaters. I ended up putting an old t-shirt over the back of mine at work.)
Search 2010 Gen Con events
These guys appear to be so wasteful, I bet they used sharpies on whiteboards and just threw them away after each meeting. And we wonder why there was such an Internet bubble and a recession.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Then they got bought out by Vivendi-Universal, and suddenly dropped completely off of the radar, only to be quietly shut down once they were forgotten.
Hmmmmm.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Forget the hummers, dude. Anyone else see the arcade machines? Galaga, Ms. Packman, Raiden II, Soul Edge...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Its wierd, i had two [somehow] accounts at mp3.com, both using specific-for-that email addresses...MP3.com goes up for sale, and i start getting dating-spam to these two addresses. long live capitalism or something.
But could you really expect anything from a company that can't even tell time.?!?!
Last I checked, there was only a 3 hour difference between San Diego and NY.
Some of the stuff is teenage oriented.
However, if you look at the photos from the link in the article, there is
and other goodies for those who live near La Jolla in San Diego.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I know this sounds crazy but years from now things from the Internet Boom Era will be serious collectibles.
.com registration paperwork for your grand kids etc etc.
Machines from the industrial revolution eras are now priceless. So keep some of these pentiums and
What in God's name were they doing with all that computer hardware? It's a website with a database. In a single picture there were several (five?) Sun Enterprise level servers, any one of which could do everything by itself.
I see two problems.
A) People have dumb ideas and think "the Internet" and more computers will help them make money.
B) Some other idiots loan the idiots in problem A more money than is required.
They've got a bunch of cool stuff though.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
i'm not part of anti-slash. stop being a paranoid dumbass.
-jp
As an artist that had music offered on MP3.com, I am very disappointed that MP3.com died. It's very sad, really. I've listened to bands for the first time on MP3.com which I later went out to buy a CD of. The people who suffer most from this failure is the underground music scene. The ability to get your sound out to a large audience was really a good thing for both the artists (free distro, big audience) and the listeners (free songs from a wide variety of music). All my favorite bands (MeWithoutYou, Nina Pinta and the Santa Maria, Zao, etc.) had a few free songs offered on MP3.com, and it was great if you ever wanted to show someone else some cool band. If MP3.com closed because of lawsuits, it's likely partly because major labels (or corps like ClearView) felt threatened by the ability to hear any new band out there from any musical style without being controlled by the major labels. And the idea of free AND legal music downloading must have been horrible to them. As far as those people who want to control my freedom to express myself to a large audience and to support talented bands without having to pay a large record label (most of the bands are on indie labels, if any label), I hope they rot in AO*cough*L.
You all may laugh, but I seriously want this thing There is nothing like a Tornado table.
The items up for sale include lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular
Being an industrial designer myself I can say that professionally speaking, Aeron chairs are probably the best designed ergonomic chairs in existance. Of course, Herman Miller does sell other exquisite chairs, but nothing else in itself can compare to what the Aeron offers. I do not work for Herman Miller, but I studied quite a bit in human factors in college (for design).
The items up for sale include lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular
I tried one of those at a used furniture store recently. I was too damned fat for it. Like everything else of the dot-com era, it seemed geared around hyper 23-year-olds.
Table-ized A.I.
But now what happened? Are these same people who were making money from putting music there doing so elsewhere? Is there a similar model? I posed the question in the form of a rejected Ask Slashdot submission a while back: Where are people who used to put their music on mp3.com putting it now? Is anybody making money doing so?
Too successful? At what? Giving away bandwidth and disk space?
MP3.com desperately needed to get rid of the crap. Allowing people to freely upload music wasn't a good idea- you get a lot of crap that nobody cares about, including the person who uploaded it.
Maybe charging $50/year would have cut the 80% of music that was such crap.
if they can get big money out of this auction (probably indicating people are bidding on their MP3.com-pre-owned 'sentimental' values), maybe it itself is not the last dotcom bubble yet.
by the way i almost didn't click on the URL because it says cow..anal..
come on! i work for herman miller, those chairs are sweet! best office chair ever!
The MP3 Independent Artist database continues to be maintained by Trusonic.com which was a business subsidiary of MP3.com. Many of the artists granted permission to transfer their material to that business and therefore it has not been lost as widely reported.
The Independent Artists enrolled in the Trusonic music and messaging programs are receiving regular royalty checks.
Does the Hummer come with the plastic water bottle between the driver's seat and the console? You can keep the Hummer... I just want the water bottle...
It's either "the hand writing (...) on the wall" (ie you're refering to the hand itself, doing the writing) or "the writing (...) on the wall" (ie refering to the writing itself, the text on the wall.) It's not "the handwriting on the wall" (which would be refering to the style. That's a bit like saying "The italic on the wall" or "The red on the wall".)
Anyway, it's a pet peeve, I thought I'd mention it.
All of that high-end equipment and no one knows how to focus a camera? Even a digital Camera?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
From a pure strategic standpoint, the move was brilliant. One large cash layout, and your only major competition is crushed, divided, and made irrelevant. From every OTHER standpoint, it was abhorrant. (especially in effectively stalling out any consumer-driven progression in the music industry for years)
My personal favorite alternative (which I have no problem plugging) is Magnatune. You're free to listen to the entirety of their collection via streaming MP3, your licensed with permission to share the files, and prices are negotiable. If you want to buy an album, you can select how much you pay from $1-$20, based on what you think the album is worth.
It's a truly ambitious model, and amazingly, they seem to be doing OK so far on the small scale. But can they move out of a 'niche' market? I doubt it.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
MP3.com handled 1.2 megabits per second of traffic during the peak of the day and never got below 300/400 megabits per second. This translates to the delivery of over 3 Terabytes of music in a month to the community.
MP3.com also served up over 5 million page views per day and had over 2 million media files and 250,000 artists.
MP3.com provided daily statistics to all of the artists and updated several hundred charts in over 300 genres of music on a daily basis.
All of this was done reliably. MP3.com was one of the faster web sites on the Internet.
Speed and scale requires a distributed computing solution which is exacltly what MP3.com pretty bright engineering team built. Everything was replicated and built in clusters. Distribution tools were automated so that everything remained in sync and operational metrics were extremely detailed.
A lot of the people at MP3.com did a terrific job, some made some important legal errors.
Perhaps it was the CEO's way of escaping the noise of crashing stock prices?
Chris Knight is my hero.
From the pictures, it looks like most of the good stuff is already gone. Most of the racks only have a couple of pieces of equipment in them. I cannot believe all of that rackspace was for future growth.
A coporation might stand out with a Tempest machine, but I think if I were interviewing with a firm and I saw Galaga & Ms. Pacman, I'd like to think that the handwriting was on the wall...
Frankly, if you interview for a position with a company and they show you *any* video games (or other dot-com trappings such as a "coffee bar") and tout them as employee benefits, I think it should serve as a red flag. Those kind of amenities are there for one reason: to convince employees to work for a company that they would normally run the hell away from. It's almost always compensation for some other business shortcomings (i.e. excruciatingly long hours, zero job security, a paper-thin business model, etc).
"I work 80 hour weeks, no overtime, the phones went out for 4 hours yesterday because we didn't pay the bill... but we've got free video games and lattes in the break room, and my boss is so cool, he drives a Hummer. This place is great!"
You know what? Just give me a boring old cube, a desk, a decent computer, and a steady paycheck with a company where I don't lie awake at night wondering if the doors will be open when I get there tomorrow. Oh, and some old curmudgeon of a boss who's been in business for 20 years and actually knows how to run a company.
http://www.cowanalexander.com/Events/CA031004/PV 2/IMG/IMG_0071.JPG
http://www.cowanalexander.com/ Events/CA031004/PV2/IMG/IMG_0077.JPG
Some companies just deserve to go bust. It's amazing they lasted as long as they did if thats the kind of crap they spent money on.
I mean really, does any company need giant lava lamps and stupid toys.
And how could they ever justify buying a harley?
No way, man, Joust! Wizard of War. Dig Dug. Marble Madness. If you want difficult games, go for Lunar Lander or Gravitar.
Oh, and don't forget Sinistar. "Run, Coward!"
Why anyone would want a frickin' foosball table is quite beyond me. Pool table, sure. _Maybe_ air hockey.
If you wanted to _really_ stand out with an old school arcade game, get "I, Robot."
Sorry, folks, "-1, Nostalgia" in progress. Move along...
n/t
Opposingly (and dragging info again from another post), MP3.com's original capital investment was nearly the same as the amount of money they paid out in lawsuits... and they were still valued higher than their capital rating when Vivendi bought them out. They might not have had the most business-savy executives, but they didn't run it into the ground like the rest of the .coms. I think Vivendi had more of a hand to play in that.
SIG: HUP
Seriously - I know they were mp3.com and I know what all they did. I actually thought it was quite cool. But besides the Aeron chairs giving away their inept ways, this picture is the most damning. Look, folks, if it is 11:52 in San Diego, it is NOT 3:52 in New York. It would be 2:52. And it SURE as hell is not 10:52 in Paris! Things like that just point out the sheer arrogance of a company in my book.
That's a desk from BioMorph. If you have an Aeron chair, you need the Herman-Miller of desks to go along with it, which would be BioMorph. Seriously nice desks, with the attendant pricetag. *sigh*
The founder isnt in jail, but he is being sued by Microsoft. Ever heard of Lindows? Besides, alot of other companies during the dot com bubble wasted alot more capital. Theres only 1 hummer and 1 harley, and Im not being sarcastic when I say only 1.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
Indeed, frankly, a lot of it is still justifiable.
A good chair means that 100k/year coder is gonna be able to work out their inspiration without the distractions of an aching back or sticky ass. For a $500 more then the standard office crap-chair that's a good investment, especially as a capital depreciation and defense in an bad-ergo disability suite.
Similar for food, drink, and toys. It keeps the crew in the building, talking to each other. It means they're not taking their hour off to troop to the local lunch hole where they'll be sitting at the table next to the competition spilling your plans. Figure $arcade-game = $day-at-teamwork-camp, not a bad value amortized.
Furthermore it's amazing the kinda allegiance baubles and amenities like that will buy. I've seen folks turn down 30% larger paychecks for a trendy office space, free fruit juice, and a tres kewl atmosphere. Multiply that by a full of staff and per-person it comes down to a great value with the improved recruiting and retention, costs a fraction the headhunter, interview, and training costs.
Lastly, cars and motorcycles? Promo costs. Tax code is nice to 'em and they get your name out there. Check around your current employer and you'll probably be amazed at some of the trophies and gifts and banners and other paraphernalia that they're purchasing as a matter of course.
Particularly for .com's half of the "product" was name and buzz, scoring the next VC round. Flashy toys things were standard, indeed de rigeur. Getting an article in the local paper, your logo shown at a rave, instant PR and cheap at the price. It's easy to be snide afterwards but then those were the rules of the game and what got you your paycheck, sensible or not.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I remember seeing a hummer on the road with some educational dotcom's logo painted all over it about 2 years ago. When I got home and checked out the site it had been turned into a porn site. I wonder how many failed dotcom domains were bought up by guys looking to make a few bucks by throwing up a page filled with porn banners.
In Republican America phones tap you.
I love how all the Hummer photos are out of focus.
I can't wait to get my hands on the camera that took the pictures of the Hummer.
Not one freaking clear picture, that's got to be a record of some sort.
I have found this "Aeron Chair Padding," when shredded, makes excellent bedding. FATMOUSE is well-pleased.
Now I will retire for my evening nap. I expect nut clusters when I awaken, thin, pathetic thing.
-
FATMOUSE MUST FEED.
Uhm, I had one at my desk and did not like it. I like to feel cozy fabric instead of that plastic feel that you get in this chair. Granted, I don't like leather pants either. If those are for you, you should try this chair.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
People don't realize that most of the early dot coms were basically Ponzi Schemes.
You look at these pictures of perverse excess and luxury that seemingly had little to do with their business model but you are ignoring the fact that "appearing" to be wildly successful to the point of wasteful spending was THE most substantive part of these companies' business models.
The scheme involved inflating the value and impression of the company long enough to snag another greedy investor or corporation and then hand the mess off to them. It was inevitable that at some point, the pyramid scheme would collapse in on itself. The trick is to just make sure you get out before it does, or more appropriately, make sure you're not stupid enough to let your sense of greed lull you into believing any of these people know what they're doing.
When I see things like this, it makes it a lot easier for me to live with myself knowing that while I could have over-hyped my dot-com and made a bundle, it was not the right thing to do, even though I admit that any individual or company dumb enough to purchase or pump capital into a business with no tangible revenue stream deserves to get ripped off.
my family had two gm suburbans. got rid of the first after 300,000 miles (origional engine) because the body was full of rust holes and the break system and suspension wern't trustworty enough for our lives. the second died because i was driving it and my mom neglected to tell me that there were problems with the oil pressure and i locked up the engine. (what 17 year old kid checks those gages anyway)
The irony of MP3.com in their era was that they were the only ones at least trying to following the rules. The system they had for streaming your personal music collection was invaluable. All I had to do was verify my collection (a minor nuissance, but seemed perfectly reasonable to prevent infringement), then I could listen to my music anywhere!
This was a really cool feature and enabled me access to my 100+ CD's from any net connection. If only the RIAA gave a damn about improving life for consumers. An innovative company who stepped in to an empty market with great ideas is now being evicerated on the auction block.
Now we have DRM and the new Naptser, "cheap" $13 CD's, DRM iTunes, blech.
Were it not for copyright capitalism might be healthy... Instead all we have is oligopolies all over the fucking place thanks in part to intellectual property.
And also good for your spine:
http://www.swopper.de/
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yeah, but when I interviewed at Microsoft in '96 they had the video games and the free stuff in the break room--and they made it a selling point. I don't think anybody was worrying that they'd be out of business.
Who wants to buy a part of SCO ?
They should be shutting up shop any time now.
Well, actually my wife does and I love them also. They are cushy and comfortable and cute to boot. They have less knobs than the Aeron but I don't think it hurts their versatility or usefullness.
Well, since professional IT people clean hard drives before they give them away...uh, no. Do you seriously think they're that stupid?
They may not be able to focus a camera to save their lives(it's so bad, you'd almost think it was intentional), but I strongly suspect every drive has been completely(for all practical purposes) wiped clean, and I mean more than just "zap the partition table". Further, I guarantee the music files were the least of their concerns. Financials, emails, etc...
Speaking of the photos, did anyone else notice a lot of the photos(harley, Hummer) were very obviously on someone's private property, and further, were rather lacking in mp3.com logos? Someone was getting some free vehicles for personal use on the company dime.
Please help metamoderate.
"THOSE DUMB AERON CHAIRS *eye-roll* HURR HURR HURR"
The geek then put down his energy drink to go bother his officemate about how much he really needed to install Firefox.
Unfortunately they died as well. At least I didn't bother staying until I had an opportunity to move out instead of up. It was a great first job on my resume until the fiasco, luckily for me I departed a few years before the shit hit the fan.
Working for myself is excellent. My boss isn't bad, the pay is good, the hours are a bit much but that is my choosing, and the only person I have to rely on for security is myself!
Not to mention the pool table and dart board. And were the games so exhausting that you needed to do your laundry at work (what's with the washing machine and dryer)? =^)
Seriously though...what was it like working there? Inquiring minds want to know...
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Aeron chairs are worth every penny if your job involves 1) sitting and 2) concentrating. But keep on mocking them so I can get a good price on one.
mt
If they had a Dig Dug, they would still be in business :)
Hey, folks, this kind of excess is certainly not limited to dotcom startups. Go to a nice vacation spot. Go out to dinner. There they are, a posse of execs, living it up, talking about that chip-in from off of the fourteenth green from earlier in the day. Think that's coming out of their pockets? No fucking way. That's on the shareholders dime.
Kozlowski got into a heap of trouble over that birthday party he threw for his wife on some Mediterranean island, but believe me, shareholders are getting bilked on a consistent basis by a lot of arrogant twats.
Those kind of amenities are there for one reason: to convince employees to work for a company that they would normally run the hell away from.
Wrong. The company I work for (for almost 11 years) has a pool table and dart board in the staff area. They weren't here when I started, and if they were suddenly removed, nobody here would quit.
It's almost always compensation for some other business shortcomings (i.e. excruciatingly long hours, zero job security, a paper-thin business model, etc).
We've been in business for over 15 years, everybody here works 8-5 (or 8-4:30, if you only take 1/2 hour for lunch, instead of a full hour) Job security isn't an issue (with the exception of one salesguy, everybody has been here for longer than 5 years), and our business model is pretty good.
All of which says a good deal more about them than about you.
They laughed at Einstein...
They laughed at the Wright Brothers...
But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Da Blog
When the Minneapolis offices of the Federal Reserve moved, they opened up the building and had a furniture/office junk sale. A friend and I went down there simply for the opportunity to wander through a landmark modern building that had been otherwise closed to the public -- you could even trapse through the vaults and marvel at the bulletproof glass in the cash loading areas, etc.
Anyway, they were selling a bunch of junk office stuff for astronomical prices. It was amazing to see what they were charging. I couldn't get anyone to give me a price on the raised flooring system in one of the data centers, either...
They didn't open the *whole* building officially, but we figured out pretty easily how to get to the roof (unlocked access door, had heliport). I regret to this day not stealing the sign from the door to the top-floor weapons range -- yes, there was a gun range on the top floor with a great large engraved sign that said something like "FIREARMS TRAINING FACILITY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. EYE AND EAR PROTECTION REQUIRED."
My guess is that any time you have a bunch of "DEALS", you get the class of idiot that's pennywise pound-foolish and willing to pay $1 less for used than new even if it's otherwise inferior. These people always end up paying *just* under new retail for used, and are attracted to "auctions" and "surplus sales" like flies to shit and will always drive up prices.
Maybe you should be sitting on a large pillow instead of a fucking OFFICE CHAIR if you sit cross-legged.
Fucking faggot idiot brain retard dumbass.
I can understand that you like the chairs. I spend more than I should on fancy pens, and one can reasonably argue that they're not the smartest thing for me to spend my money on. On the other hand, it is MY MONEY (at least until it goes for taxes, my gf, etc.)
The problem isn't that any of these items such as the Herman Miller chairs, the Hummers (although I could be convinced on that one...) or the Harleys aren't good, but that they're bought with someone else's money. Like the Tyco and Enron folks now, the dot-com people spent their investors' money as if it was given for their personal enjoyment rather than to fund a business intended to succeed. Items such as the above are good products, but their costs to individuals are not in most cases worth the benefits to the individuals. On the other hand, things like this are good if the money is someone else's; then the only comparison required is whether you could buy something else with which you would be happier with the money.
Bottom line - if these items are worth your money, buying them makes sense. If it isn't worth your own money to buy them, however, than it certainly isn't the job of your investors or companies to buy them for you, and they are ultimately counterproductive to the missions those people intended to achieve (because the money could almost certainly be used for things more likely to achieve their ends). When companies buy these things, someone else almost certain got ripped off to buy them - whether it is their customers, investors, or others in the company. Their presence says that the people running the show treat other people's money as their own personal piggy bank, and such people aren't to be trusted (at least not with my money).
Anyone else notice the calendar on the left side of the auction site has months labeled "February 104" "March 104" etc.? Kind of ironic that an auction site dealing in high tech liquidation sports a Y2K bug 4 years after the fact :-)
Besides... When you have a steady job and a computer, there is always emulation. ;)
"Yeah but there are better ways to get it then Hummers. I'd rather have flex-time then a chance to take the company Hummer out for a spin once a month or so. I'm sure 95% of the /. readership would agree."
Sure, but why choose? They could provide *both* flex time *and* loads of goodies. Plus, stock options and high salaries. The biggest thing about the dotcoms was that they really didn't have much in the way of expenses other than bandwidth and labor. It's also worth noting that by buying these things as corporate expenses, they save the programmers buying them themselves. The company can expense these; people can't. Plus, once they IPOed, how do they *keep* the people who just became millionaires: by treating them like millionaires.
Stock options are a nice perk in stable situations, but they are really volatile in start-ups. The problem is that if the company takes off, now all your employees have enough money that they don't need you anymore. The rational thing might be to hire new employees with regular salaries; the problem was that those people would rather work for another start up and get rich.
The worst part is that people who recognized that stock prices were unrealistic were pushed aside in favor of those who were willing to ride the bubble. I remember a mutual fund manager getting fired (or at least reassigned within the company) for pulling one of Fidelity's big funds (the one that used to be run by that Lynch guy who retired in his forties) out of stocks because they were overvalued. Unfortunately, he did this a year or two before the bubble burst and thus missed part of the run up. In the end he was proven correct; stocks were over-valued at the time. The problem was that they were due to get *more* over-valued and he missed it.
The larger problem is that the incentives are screwy. Whether it's accounting (Enron/Worldcom) or investing, there is no benefit to finding problems (like unsupportable predictions of the future). It's a lot easier to just take your paycheck and go home. If something goes wrong, you can always find another job (it's not your money at risk)...eventually. However, if you don't leap on the current opportunity, you miss your chance at a big bonus.
It's an unstable system. I get to choose whether you gamble or not. If you win, I get part of your losings. If you lose, then you lose and I come out even. Obviously, it makes sense for me to always gamble your money. Worst case? *I'm right where I would have been if I didn't.* What makes this worse is that the way the system worked, I would get paid each time you won but would not pay you back when you lost.
I talked to one accountant who used to work at one of those big firms (not Arthur Andersen, but similar in size). He said that they were all like that. Finding problems meant having to do more work and not meeting your estimate. Since the accounting firm guaranteed their price (i.e. if they find things wrong, they can't charge you more to actually fix them), there was a real incentive to avoid finding problems. No malevolence/collusion involved. Just the natural evolution of a flawed system.
Now I can hear my favorite artist when I'm in..the elevator? ;-)
Quack, quack.
MP3.com never bought any Hummers or Harleys while I was the CEO which was from inception to selling to Vivendi. I believe what you're seeing is assets from ALL the Vivendi digital music companies lumped together - not just MP3.com.
As for the fitness equipment, MP3.com did buy that. It actually makes sense because it's a one time expense to buy fitness equipment instead of providing employee fitness memberships since that was industry practice back in 1999. Also, due to ridiculous parking restrictions, we couldn't even fill the buildings with people because we couldn't get city to give us places to park cars. (It's their way of "managing" traffic and growth.) So we ended up with a ton of extra space that people can't sit in. Putting in fitness equipment made economic sense and made for healthier employees too. Plus we had a punching bag to take out your frustrations with the state of the digital music business...
Michael Robertson
Former CEO, MP3.com
I went to three auction 2 years ago here in LA and let me tell you that it's very difficult to get a good deal on anything but very expensive equipment (think data vaults, sun servers or mainframes) and of course furniture :-).
Just give me a boring old cube, a desk, a decent computer, and a steady paycheck with a company where I don't lie awake at night wondering if the doors will be open when I get there tomorrow. Oh, and some old curmudgeon of a boss who's been in business for 20 years and actually knows how to run a company.
I might recommend that you try working for the government. The non-shooting parts are pretty much like all you describe, besides the "competent manager" bit, but you can't have everything.
--
$tar -xvf
PUHleaze! Toyotas cannot be destroyed! They just keep going and going...
If the company hummer is loaded with twin .50 cals, and a few hundered rounds of ammo, that might be cool......
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
the auctioneers don't accept paypal. as if i'm going to send a money order 3,000 miles to some company i've never heard of. sure.
I'm sorry Bill, we're going to have to let you go. Your Galaga scores just aren't high enough.
I just sold windows 95 on 3.5" floppies that was still sealed in the box for 27.50 on ebay...
I put it up as a joke - saying it was a piece of computing history... people started bidding on it!
Woot.
I'm sitting in one I got for freeeeee right now. I'd pay for one, too. Worth every penny.
man rtfm
Why don't they list the aprox. times when items will be auctioned off? Basically I have to watch it all day now so i can bid on a few items? (Nope, not telling which ones I want)
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
Years ago, I worked for a computer rental company. We had set up a number of computers in a booth at a cattle related trade show. For a couple hours, my boss and I looked at the "products" being advertised in the booth next to us. Most were unitentifiable. One however looked like a giant dildo with a power cord on one end and long copper electrodes running the length of it. It was about 2 feet long. We approached the salesman at the end of the show and asked what it was. He said it was for collecting semen from bulls. "You place this in the bull's rectum and plug it in. It 'stimulates' him." It took us an hour to stop laughing.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
I knew it was coming, and just kept putting the theft off. I wish now I hadn't procrastinated so much on stealing the chair-- but when the day came and they kicked us all out and changed the codes, it was too late. I know a couple of them disappeared, and I even had a no-security-cameras route picked out that made use of the fact that our roof door was unlocked and that it lined up with the fourth floor of the adjacent parking garage. There was a 6' chainlink fence in the way, but i'm sure I could have climbed it and pulled the chair over with me. If only I had gotten around to it. *sigh*
So (much like the later simpsons episode) I made off with as much ethernet wire as I could.
One well-prepared bastard had the foresight to lock the super-expensive pro video camera in a filing cabinet and mark it with a distinctive scratch. He bought a lot of 25 beat-up file cabinets later at the auction for about $100, pried the drawer open, and took the camera home after selling the other cabinets for a few bucks to one of the furniture dealers.
The items up for sale include lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular
My butt thanks me everyday for having one.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
They are supurb, simply the most comfortable chair I've ever worked in... I too worked for a dotcom, and we had Aerons everywhere... they were supurb, so confortable, good on my posture, cool... endlessly adjustable... great things.. great... *sigh*
I didn't have enough money when my company went under to buy mine... and now there aren't really many of those Auctions in Australia any more, so I'm kinda just left wanting.
I have never been to a "internet bubble auction". What will some of this stuff sell for? How much will a chair cost? Some of these servers? Does anyone have an idea?
Chris
Java Web Application Development http://www.thinkobject.co
Lindows.com
We know, we know. They're comfortable and expensive and worth every penny. Just mod any future aeron posts as redundant please!
Well either they fixed it or I'm just too lame to see it. Actually, that statement probably doesn't need to be an exclusive or...
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
N/T
I like how the "Property of US Postal Service" label on a mail crate is blurred out in this photo:
V 2% 5CIMG/IMG_0019.JPG
http://www.cowanalexander.com/Events/CA031004/P
1) could they have spent their money on something else that would have improved your lives more for the same money?
2) did having the chairs either decrease turnover (and make the people working there happier for less pay than it might have taken otherwise)? did the chairs improve worker output or quality more than spending the same money on something else would have?
Others have referred to other potential solution to reclining problems that might solve the same problems at lower price/higher effectiveness. Part of why people don't buy these chairs for themselves often is because the price doesn't justify the expense. If there are better or cheaper ways to make people happier and I'm spending someone else's money (which I shouldn't be spending unless I think I can get something for both the investors and my business for it) then spending money on the chairs doesn't make sense.
The chairs may have been nice, and I'm glad that the company was fair in giving them to everyone. The job of companies is to spend the money efficiently - part of that is keeping their workers happy and productive. There might have been better ways to spend the money to make you happy than on a chair; when companies spend their money inefficiently or badly (as if it weren't theirs), in the long run everyone loses.
You can take this in context with my liberal opinions (the gov't is perhaps one of the worst organizations for spending other people's money).
just that the executives who ran it are accused of treating your company like it was their personal piggy bank, to the company's (and its investors' and employees') detriment.
I think "someone else's money" sums it up pretty well.
I don't see the case for the Aeron being overpriced.
Assuming a one weeks for 50 weeks a year for 8 hours a day, that's 2000 hours a week.
Assuming the chair lasts for five years (mine has been going strong for four, with a replacement of the lumbar support covered under warranty), that's 10,000 hours of use.
So, if you paid an overpriced $1200, that works out to $0.12/hour of use. Very price effective luxury. WAY better than spending more for a better car, for example. Not quite as good as the lovely luxury price-performance of 3-ply toilet paper.
Another way of looking at it is in costs saved. For example, it doesn't take too many fewer chiropractor visits to pay for the chair.
My video compression blog
Fight Spammers!
Biggest Waste of Money: Gym equipment for computer nerds.
Oh c'mon! No wonder why they went out of business. Idiots.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
A lot of toys, big comfy sofas, and audio gear.
It looks like a great nightclub - when does it open?
So they have a bunch of Aerons in another office of my company. The problem is, I don't work in that office ... and I'm guessing they might notice if I were to wheel the thing out the front door. I could, however, ship one out of the building (ala Entrapment). Do these things disassemble with any ease ... or does 1 million adjustment points = 1 million places that need to be disassembled?
I don't disagree with what you wrote. Buying expensive furniture, etc. isn't always bad - but when you buy it there should be a good reason that you do it. You shouldn't buy the furniture because it's cool, but because it is likely to make your employees happier and/or increase productivity or decrease turnover. If there is a cheaper solution to do the same thing that doesn't have serious disadvantages (added maintenance, for example), then one should do that in preference. If there is something else that might improve employee health/happiness/productivity more, then one should do that instead.
My point was simply that sometimes executives and employees treat the company's money (or the investors' money) as if were of no value and spend it accordingly, particularly on things for which they would not spend their own money. It seems like you should treat your investors' money as if it were more valuable than your own - you should act as best you can to use it properly.
HERE HERE my boss is an asshole a complete fucking ass and one hell of a dick, with balls the size of grape fruite, a flake, a real jerk, and an ego to mach curses like a sailor gives me some bull shit work and ocasionally pulls my leg.
In other words he's great in many ways he's NOT pretentious knows his shit, wants to do the same.
He DOES however let me know when I did wrong has good solid HONEST opinions for me on and solid advice, and does so without being rude and nasty.
You wouldn't believe how long I've been looking for a cocktail Dig Dug. I missed one 2 years ago at an auction when I thought $350 was too expensive. I've regretted that decision ever since.
Pretty much, if you recognize the name of the game and it's in decent shape, those 20 year old games are expensive. I've got a 1980 Black Knight pinball that's worth well over $1000. (and wouldn't you know it, too much RSI to play it)
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
I just waited for my girlfriend to buy one (at a cowan alexander auction).
When she became an ex-girlfriend, she just left the chair with me. I never even asked her for. Rather I asked her to take it several times.
Who will guard the guards?
Ah, just build your own cabinet with plans off the Internet, and put in a PC equipped with MAME. It'll be in a _lot_ better shape than any original machine. If all you want is Dig Dug, buy some broken-down board with the ROMs on it, and only load that ROM onto the MAME machine, all nice and legal.
Is that a vehicle or a racially-slurred reference to oral sex?
Any good office chair costs hundreds of dollars. A Steelcase-brand ergo chair will set you back a cool grand. The Aeron has been a back saver for me for 5 years...and I'm never going back. There's nothing else quite like it.
ObOn-topic-comment:
MP3.com was an amazing place. It was not nearly as over-the-top as it looks. It was pretty par for the course for an entertainment-related .com company. They had a tremendous staff of engineers and music folks. It was a conflict between their CEO's ego and the law that killed them.
Right.
I have bought equipment from Cowan Alexander's auctions that still had intact data present. No once over write. No Format the Partitions. No Del the Partition Table.
I can remember finding an offline copy of one company's Exchange Server's priv & pub (the entire email database if you're familiar with M$ Exchange server). Just for shits and giggles, I preped a recovery server, mounted the priv and pub. Everything in everyone's email (it was a telecom company or ISP if I remember right) available to my prying eyes.
After a few mailboxes, I lost interest and blew the whole thing away.
Oh and while on the subject. Notice how Cowan's registration page asks for credit card info, yet the page is NOT ENCRYPTED?
I was assured that a script just verifies that the number is legit (validation algorithm). I was further told if I don't like it, don't use it. I told them I should take TCP Drump and verfiy it for myself.
I sent an email to sans.org re: the possible submission of unencrypted CC data being sent via cowan, but never heard back from them.
I'm sure someone here may verify what indeed happens to this data.
Who will guard the guards?
What the heck were they doing with a $1M FPGA simulator? Doesn't seem part of their business model.
Well, I tried to sign up my band "Dancing Baptists" for $99 last fall. After they charged my credit card money, I got spit to a page telling me MP3.com is shutting down in a week, thanked me for my business, and that I could not upload any new songs. I never got a refund. After several e-mails, I gave up. It seems that many others had the same thing happen to them... too bad it did not happen to a lawyer so there could be a class action against C-net. Oh well, not worth my time, I'm having fun at my new home www.dancingbaptist.com
OK, why not open another mp3.com?
:-).
:-).
Sure, you can't keep the URL (unless that's up for auction), but the basic product -- an alternative music distribution channel for people that want more money for their songs than they could get from the big 5 record companies -- is still viable.
Mp3.com didn't die because of a bad business model. It died because of a bad court decision from a bad law, and bad advice from lawyers. Don't forget, after VU took over mp3.com, the new mp3.com sued that law firm for bad advice (now that they had the money to sue the lawyers
From my personal experience, the UI of mp3.com went downhill after VU took it over. It went from an easy to use site to an impossible to use site, so I stopped using it. So did a lot of people. Then, it was dropped and put out of business.
So lets reopen it. The guys that built the original mp3.com know how to do it, they could be the advisors even if they can't (because of lawsuit) run it themselves.
This time around, people know what they are doing. After buying the servers, you've got much of the system code. You should be able to restart it for a 1/10 of the cost this time around, especially with the lower programmer costs
Hey, I'm unemployed, and willing to work with this company!
Michael
cowanalexpander
Don't waste those cycles! Put them to use! http://www.distributed.net/
eom
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This is NOT an SSL site, do NOT send your credit card info from the form.
Great! I should be able to pick up a lot of unpurchased mp3s at a great price. They're probably going for like $2.
All that's not to say the your company (or you) should go out and drop $800 on a chair if they (you) can barely pay the electric bill. But should you/your company find itself with a little extra cash to spend on posture and long-term comfort... they rock!
Is the John Kerry auction on ebay still going on?
Look at all that stuff. Games. Gym. More games. Video studio. Audio Studio. Top end furniture. And massive amounts of computer stuff.
Something seems wrong here. I run a small business and we don't throw money around like there is an infinite amount - we are responsible. Why, when it's "other people's money" is it ok to go hog wild? When I was in a dot-com in the boom years they were spending like a drunken sailor also, and when I asked why the response was that the VC people wanted it to look like a winning company, with lavish offices and everything so that they had a good cash out strategy. All the top people knew it was insane but they had to play the game.
Maybe soon we will see an action from Lindows... er... I mean "Lind--s"
THE reason dot-coms failed wasn't because of failed business plans, or opulent spending - its Ken Lay and Enron.
Its that simple.
When you buy into the myth that dot coms failed because of something they did wrong, you buy into the lies that are permeating our society.
Here's the quick breakdown:
The most important underlying cost for all businesses is ENERGY.
Enron manipulated the energy market, which lead to radical increases in the cost of gas, jet fuel, electricity.
This lead to increases in shipping expenses - which undermined the profit margain for companies that had to ship goods, like dot coms.
The energy market in California was re-regulated in such a way to bring billions to Enron, also via manipulation. This lead to the rolling blackouts in 2000 that caused unexpected expenses - backup servers, generators, etc, plus all the additional expenses incurred during a blackout - such as water damage from frozen air conditioners, server failures, etc.
Simply put, the reason the dot com bubble burst was because Ken Lay, and his friends dubya and dick, pricked it. They siphoned off the capital, and they used their control of the media to perpetuate the myth of the dot coms.
Much in the same way that the media industry turned "fair use" into "piracy", these scumbags turned "outside manipulation and fraud" into "gen-x'ers spending money foolishly".
In case you forgot, the reason dot coms had all those creature comforts was to keep people at work for 12 hours a day! They provided drinks and food so people would work at their desk! They increased productivity through smart, progressive reforms - not by threatening entire departments with outsourcing to India!
Just don't forgot who the president was when the bubble burst!
But at least working for the government, they don't expect much out of you.
ob. "You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector--they expect results."
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
At least that's what they are calling it.
At least *what* are they calling *what*? Somebody doesn't know how to communicate......
Have you read my journal today?
In a linux magazine I read regularly (and I can't remember right now if it is Linux Format which is a UK publication or Linux Journal) they ran an article just a couple months ago about some company in Germany I think that is running what they call something like the "Open Source Music License."
The only reason I bring this up is because in my opinion the concept they are using is pretty cool. *YOU* decide how much you are going to pay for an artists album and then are given access to download it from their web site.
When you are on the payment screen it has these reminds of what percentage of your payment goes directly to the artist (and I seem to remember it's fairly high, something like 30-50% then again, I've slept since then.) So if you think it's only worth a buck, it tells you the artist is getting 50 cents, but if you pay 10 bucks it tells you the artist is getting 5 bucks
I'm trying to give you guys as much information as my swiss cheese brain can remember because I can't remember the URL, but if I remember it later on I'll hunt up the issue I'm talking about and let you know more about it.
May turn out to be an interesting replacement for MP3.com. Just a thought.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
I might recommend that you try working for the government. The non-shooting parts are pretty much like all you describe, besides the "competent manager" bit, but you can't have everything.
:^), and at one time applied for a job at the DFAO and later a job with a local law enforcement agency (both "non-shooting" IT jobs). The only problem with government work is that, compared with the private sector, the pay scales seem a bit low. Then again, the benefits are usually better.
I actually gave that some thought. I'm a previous government employee (I formerly did one of the "shooting parts"
Anyway, my current job is pretty much everything I described: boring cube, cluttered desk, a computer less than a year old, and a steady paycheck. And my CEO is about as non-dot-com as they come. However, if in the future I'm once again pounding the pavement, I'll probably take another look at government service.
Has anyone noticed they want you to register with a credit card on their non-SSL site? Hmmmm
Maybe all the ex-employees of MP3.com landed on their feet, but looking through the pictures I imagine people who were living the high life and then got the rug pulled out from under them.
-Rich