Dot Con: How Infospace Took Investors For A Ride

Jeff writes "On the subject of the dot com crash, the Seattle Times recently ran an outstanding three day series on the corruption at Infospace, with a follow up today on the company's continued relations with its founder, Naveen Jain. Sunday's cover photo of Jain's new office shows a birthday photo of himself and another self-portrait in the background. Only the reflecting pool is missing."

Comments

Re:tech, who?

[puppetman]

Actually, if you look at the window to the right (exactly where the arrow is pointing), you can see the reflection of an LCD monitor in the window.

If he was sitting in the chair at the bottom left of the picture, he'd be at the keyboard you can also see reflected in the window.

Give the devil his due

[jd]

Oracle IS slow. Of course, if they were going to buy a database, then they could still have gone with Informix or DB/2. Those aren't amazing, but they are better. For smaller datasets, then mSql and MySQL would have been logical choices.

Of course, if the data was flat, rather than relational, the choices would have been Berkeley DB, Gnu DBM and NDBM, which all store data by hashes.

Binary trees are great for high-school projects. Now, trees are used in serious projects. Game AIs tend to use B+ and B* trees, for example. I'm pretty sure ReiserFS uses trees. One way to write a compiler parser is via an n-ary tree, because the memory and CPU requirements scale much nicer than hash tables. However, none of these are binary trees, they exploit some very specific characteristics of the data, and they aren't intended as a substitute for Oracle.

People do write their own database engines, but usually only for very specialized needs. I am sure there are plenty of applications out there which are simply not suitable for any existing engine, for reasons of speed, complexity, or whatever.

From what I understand, Infospace did not have such a need. From what others have said, I doubt anyone working there would have recognized such a need, if one HAD existed.

It is utter insanity to build a system that is inefficient and unsuitable as a replacement for something that is utterly different in nature. The guy probably swapped his Rottweiler guard dog for a guinea pig, too. Hey, they both make noises and the guinea pig IS cheaper!

I'll tell you why the Dot Com era went broke. It had nothing to do with technology or expectations. It had to do with rich idiots giving money to wannabe rich idiots so that they could all be fleeced and the consumers with them.

Re:Screw the greedy capitalist exploiters

[Hard_Code]

Um, i'm pretty sure he meant the pronoun they in:

"people don't realize that they, too, are part of the "investor class.""

refers to the people, not to Ebers, Lay, etc.

People don't realize that they [themselves], too, are part of the "investor class."

Re:This story makes no sense.

[Sivar]

Infospace was a Microsoft darling because they had a very large number of production servers using Windows 2000 when it was first released, e.g. they were an "early adopter," and a big one at that (Fortune 500).
I worked for a company that was acquired by them in 2000. They had neat offices and such, but it was hard to take them seriously despite their size. A...guy I know was able to get in to any of their production servers and remote control them. Took about 15 minutes to figure out. Reportedly their main network administrator was a pompous prick with a "you couldn't possibly find a flaw in *my* setup" attitude, but I never went to their HQ to meet him. One of our DBAs, one who really knew his stuff, quit immediately after just such a meeting.

For those that are curious, they are/were a content provider, e.g. they sold canned news stories, articles, polls, etc. to the media, though this is probably an oversimplification as I declined to relocate when my company was acquired.