Slashdot Mirror
A Look Back At Ten Dot-Com Flops
climbing_monkey writes "CNET.com has posted what, in their opinion, are the top 10 dot-com flops." From the article: "The most astounding thing about the dot-com boom was the obscene amount of money that was spent. Zealous venture capitalists fell over themselves to invest millions in Internet start-ups; dot-coms blew millions on spectacular marketing campaigns; new college graduates became instant millionaires (albeit on paper) and rushed out to spend it; and companies with unproven business models executed massive IPOs with sky-high stock prices. Of course, we all know what eventually happened to this world. Few of these companies actually made enough money to recoup that cash, and when their investors fled to the hills, these start-ups died dramatic deaths. These are the celebrity victims of the new-economy bust."
As those who saw the 2000 Super Bowl (I believe that was the one) can attest, much of this money was indeed spent on marketing. At the time, this made sense: let's establish ourselves with high profile commercials, designed to reach a huge audience.
But that didn't work. If only these companies knew then what we know now: these internet services don't need to be marketed to the masses. They only need to be marketed to a select few. Take websites and software like MySpace (please!), CDBaby, Delicious Library, and even Google: these are just a handful of current web success stories that are profitable, and they've never used television advertising. The goal isn't to reach everyone; the goal is to reach early adopters who will use and actually benefit from your product. The masses will come along...eventually.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
LPs? What are they smokin'? I can't think of one good record that's come out in the past 20 years which isn't available on vinyl.
Some of those ideas are good and can/will work. Targetting the female teenage market, or webvan, or govworks, or stuff like that are good ideas. Even the online currency thingie can work, although it will be in very tough competition against the credit card companies, debit cards, or even newer stuff like goldmoney.
It's just that nearly all dot-com companies were way too ambitious and arrogant. This was mostly because they were run by business-oriented individuals (these people tend to be like that). If some of these companies didn't squander away their capital, they would still be in business. Let's also not forget that these companies didn't have good cost controls (spending millions on the the Super Bowl ads, which incidentally is the most expensive advertising around, for a target market that generally isn't even tech-oriented looks lame to me).
For example, stuff like govWorks IS the future. There is a big opportunity to streamline and automate interaction between government and citizens. Not only is this cheaper, it is is more efficient too.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
One company did cash in it's superbowl ad: monster.com
This is clearly pandering to old people (30+).
Since I'm 30 now let me say that this partially rings a chord. I'm definitely missing number 7 and 8. Good keyboards are hard to come by, but there are some specialized vendors around.
Wires are great, fortunately all the serious stuff relies on it so the threat to high signal to noise ratio is mitigated.
What I'm missing is the enthusiasm for fiberoptical communications. This would increase signal integrity (no ground loops either, at least there is spdif). There may be mechanical issues, but the main problem seems to be cost which could have been reduced by mass produced parts. This may all arrive in the future, until then I'll just wait for fibre-to-desk.
What I'm not missing are bloody LPs, The CD was a god-send.
"If only these companies knew then what we know now: these internet services don't need to be marketed to the masses."
You hit the nail on the head. The level of misunderstanding at the time was immense. I vividly remember one keynote address at the 1999 World Wide Web Conference in Toronto, given by Bob Metcalfe.
Bob had this nice tight little riff he'd made up, wherein he announced that in order to thrive on the web, a company had to eyeballize, memberize and then monetize their website. His message, as much as any other, epitomised the Oklahoma-land-rush feeling at the time, where people grabbed turf first and asked questions later.
Unfortunately, some of those questions were rather nuanced. Like, for example, 'do you not like ads at all, or do you just not want to be distracted while you're reading online?' Google found the answer to that. Go.com and others did not, to their chagrin.
MSN has only recently begun learning the folly of 'memberizing'. And people are still struggling with the problem of 'monetizing' their websites.
At the time I heard Metcalfe's talk I remember shaking my head in disbelief. Now, don't get me wrong, I respect him greatly for inventing ethernet. But further proof of the folly of the Dot Com boom was the blind faith that investors put in the business acumen of the alpha geek. Visionaries, generally speaking, are not too great at dealing with the messy details of day-to-day life, and as often as not need to be protected from it (that's one good use for tenure in Universities, by the way). Investors allowed these same dreamers into the driver's seat, and paid in spades for the decision.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Some items on there are ok, like manned space exploration or to-your-door delivery but most of the list is just dumb. Some of the worst ones:
The EV1. WTF? Why the hell would you miss this. I got the chance to try one at high school, I forget which teacher arranged to have it shown off. The thing was underpowered to the extreme, didn't have long range and was apparantly plagued with failures. However that aside it was inefficent as hell. People like to pretend like it's non-poluting because there's no tail pipe. News flash: That power was generated somewhere and coal probably did the generation. Because of the multitudes of conversions of form the power underwent, the efficency was for shit. The straight mechanical transformation of an ICE was much better.
IBM keyboards. Oh give it a rest. I have an old IBM keyboard and it's annoying. Takes a lot of pressure to hit a key and makes an excess amount of noise. Give me my nice modern keyboard any day.
Wires. Another news flash: It's easy, really easy, to get wired shit. I have a wired network, wired phone with a wired headset, wired mouse, etc. I didn't have to search for any of it either, all was readily available at my local stores and from major online shops. I also have wireless things like a cellphone, but let's not pretend like wired items are special order.
LPs. Give me a break. Ok so we can debate all you want if a $50,000 audio setup with a good truntable, awesome stylus and tube amps sounds better than a digital setup with transistor amps. Whatever, point is LPs at consumer pricepoints blow, are fragile, and aren't portable. For $150 you can get a digital system that will fit in your pocket and give you nice distortion free (relitively speaking) music. For $150 you can get a marginally acceptable LP player, and none of the supporting hardware required to make it useful.
I personally find that there's basically no technology I miss. I find that I either like the new stuff better, or I can get the new equivilant of the old stuff for a better price. Like I've heard some people lament the death of good VCRs. They talk about the old VCR they had that lasted 10 yeasr, and how their new one sucsk. Of course the old unit was bought when VCRS were $500 in today's dollars, the new one was $30. Guess what? You can get a $500 VCR today, it'll be a professional unit and it'll look great and last forever.
Why does money make people lose the ability to do arithmetic?
Your comment on it being "real" makes me think of one thing a simple construction worker has over a $60k/yr software engineer. 50 years from now, it's pretty likely their handywork will still exist. 10 years from now, It's very doubtful what a software designer made will be in use (at least it shouldn't), let alone 50 years.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
How many times have you signed on with a new company, looking to see if they live up to their own hype, only to find yourself with broken equipment, grossly inadequate service, and ridiculous overcharges? How many times have you then gotten on the phone with them, only to find yourself talking to a "customer service" rep for whom "retarded" would be a grandiose compliment to their intelligence?
And on the other end, how many companies have you seen lay off more and more of their engineering, manufactoring, production, and anything else that constitutes actual work, while they keep expanding the marketing? With quotas for the phone reps to sell you more stuff instead of fixing what's wrong with what you already bought? I see something wrong with a ratio of ten managers, five marketers, and seven phone reps to every one producer, particularly when payday rolls around and instead of the raise I wanted, I get a stress-squishie or a dead calculator with the company name encrested on it as my "employee appreciation gift".
Dot-com bust? Tip 'o the iceberg!
This message made me think.. a three button mouse.. When I had one of those, I operated it using my first three fingers. With the raised wheel for the middle button though, it seems more natural to operate it using two fingers, and move the forefinger between the wheel and the primary button. I should try to train myself to go back to three fingering the mouse, for better efficiency and less strain on the finger.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I wasn't talking about markets in general, dolt. I was talking about the stock market, which - despite its occasionally-used function of helping businesses raise capital (i.e. when new shares are put up for sale) - generally serves no purpose except to allow people to try to make deals that benefit them financially (at others' expense, of course).
If you want to buy or sell financial instruments, you go the goddamn stockmarket.
Exactly. But the buying and selling of "financial instruments" is no of real value to society. It's a vacuous, pointless game that - unfortunately - is becoming the basis of our economy, rather than activities that have some actual value, such as manufacturing things, or producing food, or providing practical services. The "financial instrument" market is just buying and selling... money. (Hell, even the drug market is more useful: it brings people a product they demand, and provides income for the suppliers.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
While we feel close to the 'huge' losses of the dotcom boom/bust, we must not loose sight of the fact that two US corporations (Enrom, $80+ billion, WorldCom $74+ billion in 2000/2001 alone, and Tyco) probably account for more direct losses than all the dotcom spending. It was these big corporate failures trashing the stock market, that led to widespread losses amounting to trillions of dollars (billions from State pensions alone), that then brought down our favourite dotcoms.
The dotcoms may have been pretty fireworks, but they were not the monetary black hole that snak the economy.