Slashdot Mirror
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dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular, along with servers and notebooks that are probably hopelessly out of date.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.
I think that second thing is the secret teleporter that they were working on...
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.
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.
Just a heads up, the giant Pez container just has many packs of normal Pez inside, not the giant Pez candies we crave.
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.
You know that "Step 2: ???", it usually takes a lot of driving.
I dunno what Pootie is/was. Behind that rack are probably some Rimage CD burners. DAM CDs anyone?
"this thing" is just an artsy piece. I always snickered, because it looks like a condom. The silver stuff is a stretchy fabric. It doesn't go up and down, even though it looks like it might.
"this stuff". Heh. I don't know whose office that was. Those desks are really cool- the two sections are adjustable. There's a crank so you can bump them up and down.
The rocket ship is from the College Tour, where Goo Goo Dolls showed their reliance on ProTools.
MP3.com died because they lacked a solid business plan.
-ted, at mppp from July 99 to Jan 03.
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.
Sorry.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
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.
Ahhh how I miss the good old days when corrupt business men purchased a different kind of hummer with corporate money.
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.
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.
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.