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."
- Manned space exploration
- Kozmo.com
- the original Napster
- The Concorde
- GM's EV1 (interesting)
- The original Palm Pilot
- Good keyboards
- Wires
- LPs
- The Newton
(I would have put kozmo at #1. Those who used it know what I'm talkin' about.) Read the part about the EV1 car, though. Pretty interesting.They spent something like $100 Million on those stupid 'cat' things. That has to be the biggest flop. The amazing thing is that Belo is still in business. (Papers and TV station)
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
andover.net? VA Linux?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Interesting article - it actually lists Kibu as a Top 10 DotCom bust site.
There is a nice book by Lori Gottlieb and Jesse Jacobs called, "Inside the Cult of Kibu: And Other Tales of the Millennial Gold Rush" which talks about the madness during that era.
Nothing new, but it is an interesting read, written by some of the very people behind Kibu.
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.
But at least it's CEO and his pals cashed out in time. Wonder if slashdot sucks so much now because CmdrTaco is living high on his LNUX riches.
First, I invested in some of those dot coms at ridiculous prices. I'm young, so it's not like I blew my life savings or anything, but still... lesson definitely learned.
Second, I worked in one of those never-quite-successful dot coms. A small company that started just late enough to miss the VC gold rush (or at least that's what we told ourselves). I had to exercise my options before I could tell if it was going to be bust. Regrettably it did bust. Oh well.
I'm feeling the heebie-jeebies about the housing market right now. Seems pretty similar: lots of institutional investment, lots of trendy discussion, lots of people moving around a lot... we'll see, but I'm not too hopeful about real estate right now.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Just kidding, Slashdot isn't a flop obviously, but I wonder if ONSALE.com ever traded stock, because they sure flopped, then turned into newegg.com and now I don't even know what business they are. Everything lost to eBay sadly.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Wait till this one pop. It'll have the dot com era seem so yesterday. Go to this website http://www.stock-market-crash.net/housing-bubble.h tm. In 1989 Japanese housing bubble, housing prices tanked for 13 straight years. US might do the same. The hi-tech industry is recovering alright considering the short period of time.
Dot ComBack, Or More Of The Same?
Dotcom Era Fads
Dot-Com Service Memories?
The Dot Com Super Bowl
Another Dot-com Boom?
*sigh* the goo' ol' days
The best thing is, the next "big thing" that comes along and the same people (plus some new investors who were kids the last time) will repeat the exact same mistakes that they did during the dot-com era. Never underestimate the power of human greed (not to mention herd instinct as everyone around you is screaming "Buy, buy, buy") to fool the mind into thinking "This time it will be different."
BTW while I have seen plenty of news articles about how stupid investors and companies were during the dot-com era, how about some insiteful self-criticism about the role the media (including the tech media) played in building up all the hype that helped produce the atmosphere that allowed these excesses to take place, esp. in light of how they profited from the era (eg. advertising)?
I've been going to auctions and estate sales, picking them up for a few bucks a crate. Got about 1500 so far. There's a lot of Montavani and polka stuff, but every once in a while something really interesting, like some old jazz or blues will show up.
The good ones I clean up using a damp microfiber cloth, then convert to digital.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
...brings back some memories...
Coca cola backed rocketcash was a pretty dumb idea. It was another virtual currency, I won 1000 dollar of it (yes it was worth that in USD) and tryed to order large amount on sites with it only to be harassed by their "partners" because all rocket cash did was fill in websites order info with your name and THEIR visa card. so I would get a call from (ebgames I believe it was) asking me to confirm my visa number and give them my DL # and all that and I would tell them ITS ROCKETCASH! I ended up having to call cokes marketing department and yelling at them. Anyone eles use that crap?
Wow. It's funny...albeit scary...that not only do I remember most of those but I actually used them. Webvan wasn't a bad idea, it just wasn't implemented correctly (or was ahead of its time like the Newton was). Kozmo just plain rocked. I was in Atlanta at the time and that was one of its markets. I didn't fully grasp it's model, but I had their magnet on my fridge and used them at the local burrito place. Oh yeah...back to the question. So for those of us that actually used these things, are we early adoptors or dumbasses? I will admit that Webvan had some damn good prices on some things if you did your shopping.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Boo.com became a cautionary tale by deciding that supporting MacOS was unnecessary. Although their target market was probably 95% Windows95, the journalists who reviewed the site were 95% Mac. Once you hit a screen that tells you that your OS isn't supported, you're probably not going to write anything nice.
Dec 10, 1999, 07:10 UTC
By Eric S. Raymond
A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly rich.
I was at my machine, hacking, when I got email congratulating me on the success of the VA Linux Systems IPO. I was working on my latest small project -- a compiler for a special-purpose language I've designed called Scriptable Network Graphics, or SNG. SNG is an editable representation of the chunk data in a PNG. What I'm writing is a compiler/decompiler pair, so you can dump PNGs in SNG, edit the SNG, then recompile to a PNG image.
"Congratulations? That's interesting," said I to myself. "I didn't think we were going out till tomorrow." And I oughtta know; I'm on VA's Board of Directors, recruited by Larry Augustin himself to be VA's official corporate conscience, and it's a matter of public record that I hold a substantial share in the company. I tooled on over to Linux Today, chased a link -- and discovered that Larry Augustin had taken the fast option we discussed during the last Board conference call. VA had indeed gone out on NASDAQ -- and I had become worth approximately forty-one million dollars while I wasn't looking.
Well, that didn't last long. In the next two hours, VA dropped from $274 a share to close at $239, leaving me with a stake of only thirty-six million dollars. Which is still a preposterously large amount of money.
You may wonder why I am talking about this in public. The first piece of advice your friends and family will give you, if it looks like you're about to become really wealthy, is: keep it quiet. It's nobody else's business -- you don't want to look like you're gloating, and you don't want to be deluged with an endless succession of charity appeals, business propositions, long-lost best friends, and plain bald-faced mooching.
Trouble with the "keep it quiet" theory is that I've made my bucks in a very public way. When you're already a media figure, and your name is on the S-1 of a hot IPO, and email from friends and journalists starts coming in like crazy as the stock breaks first-day-gain records, playing it coy swiftly ceases to look like a viable option.
Besides, it wouldn't be fair to dissemble. I serve a community. I'm wealthy today because my efforts to spread the idea of open source on behalf of that community helped galvanize the business world, and earned the respect and the trust of a lot of hackers. Larry thought that respect was an asset worth shelling out 150,000 shares of VA for. Fairness to the hackers who made me bankable demands that I publicly acknowledge this result -- and publicly face the question of how it's going to affect my life and what I'll do with the money.
This is a question that a lot of us will be facing as open source sweeps the technology landscape. Money follows where value leads, and the mainstream business and finance world is seeing increasing value in our tribe of scruffy hackers. Red Hat and VA have created a precedent now, with their directed-shares programs designed to reward as many individual contributors as they can identify; future players aiming for community backing and a seat at the high table will have to follow suit. In this and other ways (including, for example, task markets) the wealth is going to be shared.
So while there aren't likely to be a lot more multimillion-dollar bonanzas like mine, lots of hackers are going to have to evolve answers to this question for smaller amounts that will nevertheless make a big difference to individuals; tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, enough to change your life -- or wreck it.
(Gee. Remember when the big question was "How do we make money at this?")
The first part of my answer is "I'll do nothing, until next June". Because I'm a VA board member, under SEC regulations there's a six-month lockout on the shares (a regulation designed to keep people from floating bogus offerings, cashing out, a
Ol' C. Everett just didn't know what he was getting into.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The article was very interesting, for those that actually RTFA. The article definitely brought back memories. On another note, did the GovWorks logo remind anyone else of the NetBSD logo?
#include ".signature"
They were the ones that hired Gurkha bodyguards. I don't need to say anything else, I think.
This guy is way out there
While alot of these dot-bombs had shaky business plans, if alot of these IPOs had happened around now (with broadband access more widespread) than back in the late 90's with mainly dialup access and a smaller computer user base, the casualty rate might not have been as bad. But some definitely tried to grow too quick (like Webvan).
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
I used to buy from egghead.com in the past. Amazon bought them when they were sinking (partially due to a large credit card # theft as I recall), and the site now links to Amazon's electronics site. I then went to the eggcellent Newegg (couldn't resist...). Anyone know what the deal is with all the eggs? There is no direct relation according to newegg, but I doubt they could have chosen that name w/o knowing the resemblance....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
The author here misses the intended audience for Flooz, as far as I could tell at the time--which is to say, those people who cannot have credit cards. Kids and teenagers. Especially teenagers. Give a kid cash and they can spend it at a local store but not online. Give them a check and they don't have an account to put it in, much less a way to spend it after. But Flooz meant that you had your choice of ways to spend the money.
Nobody was going to actually put money into a Flooz account and then use it to buy stuff for themselves, I assume, but it was a halfway decent gift idea. Not worth the hype, though. Now that you can get prepaid 'credit' cards--which I'd never heard of or seen at that point in time, myself--there's no point. But some of us did have a use for it then!
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
etoys.com is actually once again an independent business, not part of KB Toys. This happened more than a year ago.
From their own FAQ,
I heard that eToys is under new ownership. What does this mean?
You'll continue to enjoy shopping our incredible selection of popular toys and video games, unique learning toys and hard-to-find specialty toys at eToys. The only changes are behind the scenes. The company that owns and operates eToys separated from KB Toys, Inc. on May 10, 2004 after a management buyout. Our new company name is eToys Direct(TM), Inc.. The staff that made eToys one of the most popular online destinations for toys and video games continues to operate the eToys web site.
What is the relationship between eToys and KB Toys?
eToys is no longer a part of KB Toys, Inc. Our new company name is eToys Direct(TM), Inc.
One company did cash in it's superbowl ad: monster.com
I think my coworkers and I were largely responsible for this one going under. Jonesin' for a candy bar? Quick, call* Kosmo! Some ice cream sound good? Kosmo will get it here fast! A couple of the guys used to do this on purpose - they'd all want something, but they'd place their orders just far enough apart that the guy (and it was almost always the same guy) had to make multiple trips.
From a customer's point of view it was a wonderful concept; but there's no way Kosmo could ever have turned a profit.
On a related note - anyone else remember when Outpost.com provided free overnight shipping with no minimum purchase?
*"Call" in this instance means "go to Kosmo.com and place an order", of course.
#DeleteChrome
There was a real brick-and-mortar, mail-order prescription drug fullfillment business footing the bill for this. It had been started by a father. He was semi-retired and had turned the business over to his two sons. The Web site was their idea and they were in charge.
We had a million dollars in middleware, a couple million in consulting to customize the middleware, an Orcale backend running on a high end Sun (E7500), and the Web site itself running on a top of the line, Sun E10k. At this point there was about $5 million sunk into the project, and we had not yet gone live.
Before going live, management felt the need to run a load test. At that point, you saw the IBM commercials on TV were dot coms went live only to see the site crash due to too much traffic. They didn't want to see that happen. The load tests showed that we could only handle 1000 simultaneous transactions. Clearly, that wasn't enough. So we bought another E7500, another loaded E10k, and another Oracle license. I don't know the exact numbers but I think this was close to another $3 million. With this new equipment and an additional DS3 line, we could handle 2500 simultaneous transactions.
Early in 2000 it comes time to turn the web site live and crank up the advertising. Tension was running high - and expectations were greatly disappointed. The largest number of visitors we ever had to the site was eight. We never had more than one active transaction.
I only stayed around for another couple of months. Before I left, the father, who founded the business and ultimately footed the nearly $10 million dollar tab, said:
It think the parent post may be some sort of FUD.
Why didn't you go to the site yourself?
Not even death is it remembered.
They forgot to mention Zombo.com.
Oh what a time it was. First...I like to play the market. I made a lot of money for myself and for friends and coworkers keeping tabs on these dotcom-era mysteries. I made one coworker a whoppin' $50k on some of my insight. Of course...the big pin came to pop the bubble and I lost $11k in one damn day (I wasn't even in town that day to watch the market so imagine my surprise when I got back).
I got called it from @work/@home for an interview. They flew me across the country, gave me a car, interviewed me. They had the foosball tables around. Totally chill place. I remembered reading about all the other companies that had pool tables, video games, stocked fridges, company cars, etc for their employees. Sounded fun. I didn't make the cut. A year later, the company didn't make the cut either.
I got a call to work for Alta Vista (remember them?) to do some HTML work. I had JUST received an offer to work at a more stable, multi-national company as a web developer but I was willing to entertain their offer. I asked what they wanted and they wanted nothing more than HTML coding. They were willing to pay $60k or so to do that. It was much more than my current offer but I took into consideration the fact I'd have to move the family across the country and still wasn't sure it was the safest thing to do. I'm glad I didn't because within five months the company had gone under. Go figure.
As a CMU grad right about the time the net bubble was growing, I saw A LOT of "and we're the coolest company on the planet" propoganda. I watched Cramer on CNBC talk about how all these companies (of course, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay were some of them too) had nothing to stand on. "Get out! It's gonna crash!" It did. Still...it's interesting to see what survived and what didn't.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
The only thing "astounding" about the dot-com boom/bust is that it puts into clear relief just how divorced from reality - or any other productive use of time and energy - the stock market has become. It serves only as a means for people to make money on paper, and contributes to the well-being of society and the economy only by accident.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
They forgot both Broadband Investment Group Corporation (BIG) and the Intira Corproation. =( Some info here.
How did anyone expect to make money on providing free internet service with no ads?
NewEgg was a spin off of ABS Computers; a system builder in California. NewEgg became such a hit primarily due to timing , but mainly due to their pricing. The Eggs were definitely incorporated to get people to THINK they had something to do with Egghead. NewEgg was able to secure such good pricing by using ABS as leverage when going to component manufacturers, thus cutting out the distributor.
HJ
What I think would work is for one of the large supermarket chains (e.g. Coles or Woolworths in australia or whatever it is in your part of the world) to get into online sales.
You would order online via their website (with the right tech you could even make it possible to swipe a barcode and order that way) and then they would package the order for you.
Given the need for it to be "local" and given the initally small demand, the best way to do this would be to implement it such that you place the order online then someone goes around the local supermarket and gets whatever it is you ordered which could then be picked up or delivered (with people paying extra for this).
I am sure a fair few people would love to be able to have their weekly food shopping home delivered or packaged ready for them to pick up on the way home from work instead of having to take the time to wander around the supermarket (even if it cost a little extra, depending on how much your time is worth the time might be more valuable than the delivery or packaging costs).
The service could also be combined with stores like K-mart, Target or Big W in australia or whatever it is in your part of the world where you could have department store items available through the same service (i.e. you would be able to have department store items available from the same online site and delivered/packaged along with your food).
Essentially you would be paying someone else to go and find/buy the food you want (someone who would know exactly where everything is located and might therefore be able to find what you want faster) and then optionally paying for it to be delivered.
"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.
How can they forget zap.com? The whole story of zap.com is as ludicrous as it gets.
Zapata Corporation, a fish oil company with no internet experience, was determined to cash in on the internet gold rush in the late 90's. Zap.com, an internet portal site, was one of a whole slew of sites that were trying to compete with Yahoo!. Mismanaged, and arriving too late for the portal game, zap.com lasted less than a year.
Alternative Minimum Tax laws are not just for the super rich. For those of us who happened to get in early enough into a dot com, work our asses off, go public, vest, exercise when they were high, hang onto the shares for 12 months for the capital gains taxes, watch the share price collapse in those 12 months, and got lucky enough to sell off before getting caught by some of the dumbest tax laws out there. I escaped by the skin of my teeth, and other I know did not.
SUNW at $85 was a deal. SUNW at $75 was even a better deal. SUNW at... Lots of new lessons on the stock market in general. Watched friends lose houses when trading margins.
PETS.com stock certificates made great white elephant gifts. Worth every penny. Just waiting for SCOX to get under $2 a share to do it again. It will be framed next to some of the other stinkers decorating my office.
Miss the beer in the soda machine. You can imagine our shock when a customer actually wanted a tab soda.
A Sun 440 is not needed for an email server. Makes for a lousy counter strike server too.
When the economy started exploding, the financials of the company were more important than the foosball table.
Remove the Diablo mule characters from CVS before you sell the company.
You can pour your heart and soul into work. Rarely matters. Never forget your family.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
"HD Radio" is unnecessary but not particularly stupid per se. If they found a way to make it value-added the way the BBC did with their DAB services, then it would make sense...
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.
One site I've started reading in the past several months is The Housing Bubble 2 blog. (It has a "2" because the Illuminati convinced Blogspot to shut down the original site.) This guy collects real estate news from all over the world and he has a comments section that attracts an interesting crowd with some good information.
This bubble is not just something that affects places like San Diego- it's worldwide and echo bubbles are infecting markets that hadn't yet been reached. Even sh8tholes like Bakersfield are seeing a 33% year over year appreciation and people are falling over themselves to buy crap land in West Texas. People are leveraging themselves with interest-only ARMs to buy houses they otherwise could never afford and many are already on the edge of bankruptcy even though rates are still low. When the credit crunch hits it won't be pretty. Close to 40% of all jobs created since the last recession have been in construction and real estate, and this country has built millions of unoccupied units at a ferocious rate in the past few years.
The mere fact that everyone is yakking about real estate is a sign that the smart money is cashing out and moving on.
The world "real". You are buying real property with real estate, it's not something that can just vanish in a puff of digital logic. It's also a scarce resoruce, there's only so much land in the world, and even less of that in areas people find desirable.
So, barring really stupid investements, you never lose everything. The market may go down and you may not be able to get what you thought for it, but you never really lose everything because you have soemthign tangable, a peice of land (and the associated structures, if present).
Now you still don't want to make stupid decisions, there certianly are markets that are over valued and will go down, at least in the short term, but in the long term it's really unlikely for real estate to drop in value.
Even if you don't decide to really invest and get pure investment properties, you should get a house if at all possible. When you rent, your money goes nowhere. It just dissappears to your landlord every month. You live there for 10 years and leave with nothing. However if you own a place, your money goes to paying for it, as well as going to pay the bank's intrest charges. The longer you live there, the more you pay down, and the more you can get when you sell it. And, of course, you get use of it, you get to live there while you are doing this.
Not everyone wants to get in to actual real estate investment (like buying rental properties and such) but nearly everyone should look in to investing in to a home. Unless you live in a seriously expensive market like a big city, it's worth it. Maybe you have to take a step down and buy something older, and smaller than you are used to living in, but at least your money is then going somewhere that will do you some good.
The offering raised $243 million for StorageNetworks, which sold 9 million shares at an initial price of $27 million. And it gave the company, which had 88.2 million shares outstanding, a market valuation of $7.96 billion.
3yrs later STOR was dead... run into the ground by greedy management that wanted to take a services company, and turn it into a software company. A classic pump and dump by CEO Peter Bell, backed by Goldman Sachs (who btw 'donated' a number of low level managers who became STOR executives...
We were all told... "we're not giving out alot of preIPO shares (ie: 2000+) because we want to keep the total outstanding number down." Funny, though, if you were an "insider", you could make millions..
Plus there were 5 sexual harrassment lawsuits against STOR... all settled out of court.
I used to feel bad sometimes using that service as i would normally save 75-80% on groceries.
It was a bit difficult shopping for items on the list and finding a clerk that knew what was going on, but the savings were worth it!
I'm not saying they are right or wrong, it's not an issue I've chosen to investigate because I just don't care (I already own my house, at a rate I can afford) however that site is very high on the alarmism and light on the facts. The somain name alone should giv ethat away, but on the page you link they are heavy on scary talk and throwing out numbers but light on providing information substantiating those numbers. For exmaple the $32 trillion is US debt. Ok, according to who? And what kind of debt? Not all debt is created equal. $100,000 of unsecured credit card debt, spent on luxury consumables would be considered disasterous. $100,000 of secured debt on a home would be considered a good investment. Either way, from where do these numbers come?
So if this is what you are basing your views on, I encourage you to do more careful research and perhaps revising them. Like I said, I'm not interested in arguing and I don't have any counter examples, it's just that site sets off the BS metre in a big way. When people start throwing out lots of stastics with no backing, espically when presented with a fear-mongering tone.
Let's see Im 24, live with my Pops.....not a bad deal!!! I have a fish!! His name is Sigmund...he is cool!! I like to have fun with my friends, I love to goof off and be a big DORK! and I LOVE to go to the beach. What I dont like is when people cant drive and talk on the phone at the same time. Thats annoying. ha! Im pretty laid back...even just renting a movie is good enough for me. I am a very curious person, if someone says I have to tell you something or I bought you something I HAVE to know what it is right then. I forget things all the time...like items and what Im gonna say. hahahah. Jen knows this ALL too well. hahaha.
Wow. People like this do exist. This poor gal has a keyboard missing the quote key and a brain missing about 12 years of education.
The masses have come ;-)
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Two of the three closest grocery stores to my house are an Albertsons and a Safeway. (The other one is a QFC-- but they don't seem to do the online shopping thingy, ah well.)
These companies weren't expected to succeed. The VCs even said so: profits didn't matter, sales prospects didn't matter, even embarrassingly stupid products didn't matter. What mattered was that large amounts of money could change hands with very little oversight. It was money launderers' heaven.
If you want to pay somebody off, buy their company at a massively inflated price. (No company to sell? Start one!) Want to hide paper profits? Stage a stock collapse. Want to reward a toady? Make him CEO or CFO of a startup. (The CEOs were all directors of one anothers' companies.) Want to pocket the investors' money? Have your CEO spend it all at your marketing or advertising service.
None of the money was wasted. It wasn't burnt. Every dollar went into somebody's pocket. Every dollar came from somebody else's. One group got most of it, another lost most of it. The ones who lost were pensioners, whose pension funds were "mismanaged" into oblivion. Did the pension fund managers suffer? Or did they make out like, er, bandits? Which do you think is more likely?
This is not to say that everybody involved was a crook. Lots of people worked really hard to try to make something new, and most of them suffered as much as the pensioners.
How do you imagine W funded his campaign? His father used banking fraud, and had to bait Saddam into invading Kuwait to keep son Neil (Silverado) out of prison. The W crew relied on more modern, less legally-risky securities fraud (Enron). They're not very imaginitive, though: count on the VCs to ramp things back up before the next election season.
"Buy underwear in your underwear! "
I think that should sum it all up.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Do tell. How in the world do you have equity in a property you don't own? Enquiring minds want to know.
I attended a pre-dot-bomb Go.com dinner party in Hollywood followed by a free House of Blues concert with K.C. and the Sunshine Band. They spent an unbelievable amount of money wooing partners at this party, and I kid you not, 90 percent of the people I spoke to knew dick. They called themselves "producers", as if that meant something. Most of their people were very young and knew nothing about business. Stupid times... The fools had it coming.
---- I have nothing more to add.
I've still got my IBM keyboard. It came with the first computer I ever owned (and still own, it is in the closet of my room at my parents' house): An authentic IBM Personal System/2 Model 8556. Made in 1993, it sported a 486SX (no heatsink or fan needed here!) at 50mHz, MDA graphics, a token ring adapter, external SCSI port, internal XT hard drive (200MB, I've got more than twice that much RAM now), 3.5" floppy drive, 16MB RAM, excessively crappy mouse, equally crappy 14" monitor, and a wonderful wonderful keyboard. All for 25$ at my scout troop's rummage sale.
I am typing on that keyboard right now. Yes, it is hellishly loud, but the feel of the keys is unmistakable, and I never, ever have problems with keys sticking, or not responding, or any of the things I hate about almost every other keyboard I've ever used. Plus, the key caps come off easily, and most are interchangeable... This is fun. My little sister is perpetually confused by the arrow keys (point in opposite directions), and most people have a hard time with the swapped F-key row and numeral row.
But, suffice it to say, this 12 year old keyboard is the most beloved and probably most irreplaceable part of my computer today.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The low interest rates and the high real estate prices is what softens the negative effects of the dot com bubble. Basically, the society lost a lot of money on stocks, but gained a lot of money on real estate. This way, the dot com crash doesn't create as heavy wounds as it might have done.
If the real estate prices are a bubble, and it bursts, the politicians will consider the size of it and maybe compensate differently. Unfortunately, the USA has a huge deficit, which limits the options.
... check out Downside's Internet Deathwatch and see how many "charts not available" there are.
Somebody else psoted a link refuting your critic point by point : Why EV vehicule failed.
Aren't you simply repeating what you hear as propaganda without even knowing it a bit better ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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!
The thing is the whole Japanese economy went as well - it wasn't just housing. It was really, really bad management and bank corruption.
The US is way better off, and for a while now the economy has actually been doing pretty well. Not exactly the makings of a dire housing market. Not any great rise either, but that's the best situation - just very slight growth.
However the real consideration is this. What happens when people start living much longer. What happens is a trickle-down effect of the eldery living in homes longer, and thsu the entire supply of housing diminished thus keeping prices afloat or rising as new people to the market seek homes.
Read the book "How to live long enough to live forever" which raises some pretty good points that some fairly impressive medical tech is only ten years off and even more impressive stuff not long after that. Even is you want to be pessimistic and say it will be fifteen or twenty years before we'll see anything impressive in terms of longevity increases, it's still a good idea to at least own a house now instead of rent. Calculate how much a house would have to depreciate to cost as much as rent does for even moderate apartments - if the price of your house falls it doesn't mean you are nessicarily worse off than you would have been - especially if you can just live there and keep making payments, as every bubble is followed by a rise. Just don't take a crazy house payment and live beyond your means.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A friend bought a Toshiba right around the same time I bought mine and his ended up melting (video card overheated, nothing they could do about it). I could've dealt with cracking plastic if only it was easy to service the heatsink/fan for overheating problems, and more importantly if the powerack didn't break (the problem you mentioned re: hp and compaq laptops is exactly what happened to my Toshiba).
Maybe they had quality issues a couple years ago and are better now, but I'm not going back. My new laptop is a Dell, and has a nice metal lid (no way this one is going to crack at the hinges!). The powerjack is a much sturdier design, and best of all is the point you mentioned -- Dell's business model means that their laptops are easily disassembled, and spare parts are easily available (even from Dell, if you don't want to go the ebay route). Add to that the crazy deals that are out there if you hit some of the coupon sites and you can get a really good laptop for a great price. (note: not affiliated with Dell, just really enjoying my new laptop).
As for the Toughbook suggestion, I'm not hard on laptops. I don't drop them, or put them in bookbags or anything like that. That's why I was so disappointed that normal wear and tear could so effectively shred a higher-end laptop in such a short time.
J. David Kuos "Dot.Bomb" was a brillantly written account of how to burn an extra-ordinary amount of money by doing some of the most astonishingly idiotic business decisions ever.
Very, very good read. Highly recommended.
Lets say my house value drops in half. I have a lot of options:
1) Simply do not sell. As long as I can make payments, I have lost nothing - it's like panicking and selling a stock early that goes up again. And eventually, housing does go up again. I live in Denver where we had an oil industry bust about twenty years ago that had people literally walking away from houses with the doors open because they could not afford them and no-one in the area could or would buy them. Yet now Denver has a thriving (some would say too thriving) market. As another poster said, people have to live somewhere and even if there is a glitch in pricing for a bit there are more and more people all the time.
2) Can't make payments? Well then why did you have the house in the first place! Declare bankruptcy and take your lumps. See, you've hardly lost anything!
But really house prices would have to drop a HUGE amount to make it a worse deal than renting. Of course, the proper way to go about things is to buy something easily within your means - then as you income grows buy new places that are within your means and rent out the old ones to make someone else pay your old mortgage.
People who are holding off buying into housing are just hurting themselves. They should be looking but be lots more picky to try and get a really good deal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If hindsight is 20/20, then why aren't we walking backwards?
If hindsight is 20/20 why do all these idiots talking out of their ass seem sound so blind.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Why is nobody mentioning the dot-com that started it all, Excite? Yes the website is still up, but it's no where near the glory they once were, not since they went bankrupt in 2001 and got bought up by some other firm.
Good keyboards are hard to come by, but there are some specialized vendors around.
That's for damn sure. Of particular note is the horrible keyboards Dell is equipping with new PCs. I can get used to the fact that they feel lame, but now they are making them slightly smaller and rearrangeing some of the keys (such as the arrow keys and cursor movement keys (home/insert/end).) It drives me mad because I've become so accustomed to those keys being in a particular place.
That particular site was written about ad nauseam, but lack of support for Mac wasn't it's major problem. The site was simply a pain to use, as has been noted in written form at least once.
Actually, eToys was ruined by etoy. Etoy, a long-existing cyber-art-project staged a massive community-operation to ruin eToys after eToys wanted to take over etoy.com. Details at toywar.etoy.com.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Here's what I learned co-starting a few web companies in Sweden between '97 and '00, one of which was a bonafide dot-com (although we only burned ~$20M).
The money came mainly from the risk branches of investment firms started off of regular industry money. Risk capital typically is 5% of the total capital. This money is more or less expected to go out the windows, hence the "risk."
The model these guys worked from was to seed a company with some potential to attract more investors, then sell their shares at 10x the buying price as soon as that happened.
They were not morons. They didn't care if your business model made it likely that you would ever actually make money. It was a pyramid game. I seed this company, in the hope that another investor will step in and buy a large chunk of the stock for signifficantly more than I paid, before it all goes to hell. The second investor makes the same gamble, praying to God that there will be someone coming in after them, buying stock for an even higher price. And so on. It had nothing to do with business plans, except that plan was part of the general image of the company.
This is what the crazy expansions were about. The seeding investor needed the company to grow fast, so they get a fast return on their money. The entrepenours were usually a lot more sane in their plans. It was, in my experience (and I mingled with the founders of most European dot-coms) that it was the investors who insisted on opening offices on the most expensive streets, start branches in London, San Francisco, and Hong Kong, and hireing a thousand people, not the founders. Because that was the only way to quickly attract the next batch of investors.
So here are some conclusions: What really happened during the dot-com boom was that regular industry money were pumped into a lot of advertising companies and computer consultancy firms, to force along development projects with broken project plans and unrealistic time tables. But it put food on the tables of a lot of consultants. It might perhaps have advanced some web technologies (such as application servers) as well.
Eventually the investors realized the game wasn't working, and they pulled out. It was an investor-driven process, and most of the money was expendable. No big loss.
i hate them because they make it harder to grip the mouse properly and move it without pressing them.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
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.
He probably has a standing offer from the landlord to buy the house he's renting. The landlord's already paid off the mortgage on the house (and then some) with the rent money, so he can say "well, you've already paid $20K into what the house is worth to me, so I'll knock that off the appraised value when you want to buy it off me."
It's just not like it used to be.
I agree with your point about 'clicky' keyboards (assuming you mean the type personified by the IBM PS/2's 'Model M'). Some people seem to love them; I found the midway pressure point of the microswitch very unnatural and offputting. I suspect that people who used them a lot will love them a lot; and those who aren't used to them won't.
I mention this because I wanted a new mechanical keyboard, but one with "linear" action that goes "tap" when it hits the bottom; the 'quality' feel that a good mechanical keyboard has. I had to import the **** thing (a Cherry G80-3000) from Germany with German labelling; UK stockists only had the 'clicky' version. Fortunately I can touch-type, and to some extent I'm used to "wrong labels" because I use a US layout despite living in the UK; but it did still cause some initial frustration.
Was it worth it? Probably; it's miles better than the cheapest membrane keyboards, although the springs on the keys provide a bit more resistance than I'd have liked, given the choice. But I'm being picky here.
And actually, some membrane keyboards really aren't that bad; my last Mitsumi was pretty nice for a UKP 10.00 thing; compared to other membrane-jobs (including, ironically, an older Mitsumi I have) it's very usable. More importantly, I had my old 8-bit Atari machines with "real" keyboards out a few nights back....
My God, they were *horrible* to type on... and from what I remember, the C64's keyboard was even worse. I'd rather use all but the very worst modern membrane keyboards than that. "Good" old keyboards are still pretty good, but never fall into the trap of believing "mechanical good, membrane bad".
I also suspect that the reason some dislike membrane keyboards is simply that they're used to the action of a mechanical keyboard. I found myself asking whether the 'deep' travel that most real keyboards have is necessary; my Compaq Armada laptop's keyboard has (by necessity) far less travel, and a distinctly different feel to most desktop keyboards, but it's really quite nice to type on for what it is. I actually find myself able to type faster, if anything, on that than I can on my expensive mechanical keyboard.
And frankly, for the kind of person that takes a couple of seconds to hunt and peck, and uses their computer for five minutes a day, pretty much any keyboard should keep them happy.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Most people are not even aware of them but buildnet.com burned 2 billion in 12 months with nothing to show for it. They swallowed up about a hundred small companies and took them down also. I and the company I worked for came out ok. We delivered a contracted software product to them just months before they collapsed and by some miracle we got paid!
If something exists that does not need a creator (god) then why must the cosmos need one?
Interesting, certainly.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
...theglobe.com? If memory serves, they held some sort of record regarding IPOs for a while - biggest first-day pop?
Advice: on VPS providers
The problem with the ICE is that it's way, way easier to replace a few enormous powerplants than to replace millions of tiny ones in cars. What makes you so sure that the plant generating that energy isn't hydroelectic or solar?
On the other hand, a gasoline car burns gasoline. End of story, full stop.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Link me?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
DC's business model involved spying on users. The hackers you mentioned don't generally like to be spied on. The business model was based on being evil. They deserved to be run out of business---their only possible source of profit was their crapulent, buzzword-laden spyware.
:Cat from eBay to catalog my books, but good fucking riddance to DigitalConvergence.
I think I'll get a
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
LNUX vs MSFT: now the debate can finally be resolved!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Damn, I'd buy a frickin' five thousand dollar house. That'd be sweet.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It kills me that so many /.'ers don't understand what true marketing is. It's so much more than a 30 second spot on TV. Marketing is required to understand what the customers want, and deliver the appropriate product.
The environment at the time of the dotcoms was such that many companies thought the only way to survive was to outgrow the competition. There were so any companies were going after the same market with the exact same products and services. The thought was only through growth momentum would the company be able to attract enough capital to survive until the competition died off. The alternative was to grow slowly and wait until the competition killed each other off, and exist as the only player remaining.
Both models worked for different companies, and both models failed for different companies. Of course the latter resulted in much less loss of capital for the losers
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Why would people have broadband before the Net became useful? DSL et al came in because folks wanted a better experience using news and shopping sites, among others. There was no major market for broadband in the late 90s because the customer base did not see the Net as indispensible. Content-heavy sites such as Boo and all the other Flash-infested nightmares were barking up the wrong tree for their potential clients.
In any event, the VCs kept yammering at their various start-ups about fast growth to obtain "first-mover advantage" because Amazon had grown quickly and dominated the online book market. The real reason was because, post-Netscape, VC funds were massively subscribed and the managers had to do *something* with the money or they'd have to give it - and the management fees! - back to the investors. Since mgmt fees are somewhere on the order of 1% to 2% per annum, and $20 billion had sloshed in over the past couple of years, they'd have to return something like a half billion in fees as well as the principal. As it turns out, those fees had already been spent on fat bonuses, so returning the money was right out.
What then ensued was the opposite of a gold rush. Call it a crap rush. The funds were thrown at *anything* which even vaguely resembled a business. 20 pound bags of cat food by courier and you eat the shipping? Great, great, and the shakeout means we get first mover advantage. Here's 50 million. Selling toys over the internet? Fantastic, here's a hundred million, have a party.
At the end of the day, VC managers got to keep their fees, investors got completely reamed, and the rest of us bought Aereons at a discount. There's no way in hell, even now with broadband a fact of life, that most of the dot-bomb IPOs would have succeeded. The root cause of failure would still be the same: poor business plan means outgo > income.
The "New Economy" turned out to be the same old shuck, a game played by sharpies whose interests were only tangentially related to their investors'. Good news if you miss the dot-boom days, by the way: VCs are once again massively oversubscribed and they have to get rid of the money. The bad news: they're now investing in outsourcing. Will the last person to leave the tech industry turn out the lights?
That Zombo.com is still alive and kicking. I don't know I'd get through the day without their services.
The two things tech products that seem to have been lost due to marketing pressures are:
The credit card sized scientific calculator. Casio used to sell some nice ones...
A decent digital wrist watch. The combo analog / digital watches were even better.
(This sig intentionally left blank)
"Zealous venture capitalists fell over themselves to invest millions in Internet start-ups"
Looks like they're still doing it. Viacom just bought a website where you can create "virtual pets" for $160 million: www.neopets.com
4) try to pay a little extra every month (my initial payment was $1180/mo, I at *least* always paid $1200, and generally $1300-$1500 when I could afford it) - work to pay it off.
Whenever I think of mortgage payments, I always remember a certain exercise from high-school algebra 2, where we figured how much we'd save if we made *two* payments the first month of a 30-year mortgage (followed by the regular monthly payment for the duration of the loan). As I recall, based on the interest rates of the time (1996 or so), it was seven years.
In a home loan, all the interest is front-loaded. So your first payment is just about 99% interest, and only 1% principal. Every month you pay a little bit more principal, until by the last year your payments are almost entirely for principal.
So, instead of putting more money down on the house, it makes more financial sense to borrow more money, and put your extra reserves into the first payment.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Food. Clothing. Shelter. Communications. Defense. Medical.
The only six industries vital to human existence.
All other industries can be construed as 'optonal luxuries'.
Count your blessings if you work in one of these six industries--your work is truly needed for continued survival of the human race on this planet.
This is not a joke/troll post--this is what I believe to be an undeniable fact of life:
Observe the conglomeration in the food and communications industries.
The prominence and power of the defence and medical industries.
The expensive hoopla revolving around the 'high end' part of the clothing industry.
The worry that a crash of the shelter industry will bring about a (worldwide) financial depression.
Is it no wonder the 10 'dot bombs' mentioned in the article bombed--they didn't effectively fill a need in one of the six industries I mentioned.
When I was at idealab!, at the end of 1999, there was a little company called blastoff.com.
They ultimately purchased a Soviet-era booster, with the intent of landing robotic rovers on the moon. I suppose the idea was to charge advertisers "astronomical" sums to scrawl their names in the moon dust.
After millions down the tube, something interesting happened.
In a replay of the original NASA moon efforts, blastoff.com generated multiple spinoff companies to market technologies under development to support the lunar effort. Among them were Evolution Robotics, a streaming video company (think bittorrent behind the corporate firewall), and others.
As one of the brighter developers remarked during a meeting: 'Yeah, and we're using the same "moon" as the Apollo program -- it's this warehouse in Burbank...'
The bubble man, you gotta miss it sometimes.
To me the #1 bomb of all time was POP.COM, the Dreamworks-funded failure. The site never officially even LAUNCHED after a year of effort and a lot of buzz and publicity!
I once interviewed over there. The office was a big square room with a center area that had a ping pong table and other recreational stuff (I think a grand piano). It was the epitome of dot com excess. And the guy who was running the place said something like "oh yeah, we're in a great position because upper management is letting us experiment and make mistakes until we find what works". It turns out that there wasn't as much patience as he originally thought.
The fact that they couldn't even do a soft-launch and were waiting like some perfectionists for the perfect launch is just the antithesis of dot com.
There is no excuse for not being able to put something meaningful up in a whole year.
Here is a sample piece about the shutdown:
http://www.teako170.com/pop2.html
Yes, we have a lot of land - but there's a reason why it's all still open. It might be slowly expanded into but it will never be as desireable as the core land in bigger cities (apart from the enclaves of really ritzy stuff in places like Aspec of course).
Older people are often living in the really desireable areas as well, where trees are established and so on - there is as you say always the suburbs as an option that is more affordible, but the very exitance of that keeps pricing pressure up on core housing and land. Kind of like a diamond building under pressure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The banks wouldn't really care at all as long as you still were paying the mortage insurance (and a lot of people are) since you have to have it until you have paid off 80% of the value of a house it makes it really, really unlikley you are going to get many houses that would even be at risk. About the most a bank could probably do is force you to buy mortage insurance if you didn't have any, though of course it would be up to the exact contract you signed... but those are pretty boilerplate and do a fair amount to protect the buyer from the bank (and the other way around of course).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So shoot me... it should have read partially.
HJ
But FreeWWWeb was national. They provided a free ppp account that could be dialed from every major US city. It's one thing to give away bandwidth on your own equipment, but another thing entirely to be buying bandwidth in bulk from national providers to give away for free.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why in the world would a landlord do that? A more likely explanation is that his parents own the house. Or a sugar daddy :)
Yep, I did mean 20% equity paid, no matter what I said. :-)
I figured banks had some leverage to make you pay the insurance again if housing prices dropped. It only makes sense if the law requires you to have such insurance in the first place.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley