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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dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular, along with servers and notebooks that are probably hopelessly out of date.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
servers and notebooks that are probably hopelessly out of date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
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
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...
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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*
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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
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.