Slashdot Mirror
'90s Dot-Coms — Where Are They Now?
An anonymous reader writes "The Industry Standard has put together a list of 10 dot-com stars from the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, and tracked down what happened to the services and their founders. A lot of the services are still around, albeit under new ownership, including eToys, Garden.com, and DrKoop.com. Others have been completely reinvented — Boo.com, an online clothing retailer that burned through $125 million in funding in the late 1990s, is now an online travel community. Of the founders, many were able to cash out early and/or achieve later online success. Excite's Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer later started JotSpot, which was bought by Google, and Kraus now directs work on Google's OpenSocial initiative. Others did not fare as well, such as two of the co-founders of Garden.com, who declined to cash out at the height of the bubble, and are currently 'between business ventures.' The insiders' post-mortems of the failed dot-coms are interesting — several suggest the concepts were good but too early for their time, while others identify specific factors that led to the failures — ranging from a lack of advertising to 'intense' greed."
There are still ads for Stamps.com.
Of all the Dot Bombs that I would have thought would go tits up, this was one.....guess I was wrong.
Now if only I can get LNUX back to $100 a share, I have a chance to get my IRA back into the black.
WTF? Over?
Ironic, isn't it, that the people who "declined to cash out"(read: take investors money and run) are unemployed, while many of those who pocketed the money are employed elsewhere? I would prefer it the other way around.
In case it's not been said before, thank you for having honor and respecting your investors.
I think the fundamental flaw in most of these is that the cash flow was completely disproportionate to the amount the company is valued at (stock price). This is not a trend that is going away either. Is facebook really worth billions of dollars? Really? Suppose someone buys it for a couple billion. Is it possible to recoup that investment without driving all the users away? I would argue no.
I pick on facebook, but there are plenty of other examples to be found.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Ahhh the bubble. I'm quite nostalgic about it now.
What I don't miss about the bubble is TV programs documenting some teenage CEO playing at running a business with apparent massive backing from stupid investors. Hey this kid is "worth millions"! (failed six months later of course).
That an generic domain names. I still don't know who is typing those in.
many of us who wisely avoided the felonious stock markup FraUD scamsters are doing quite nicely now, thank you.
They missed the most influential and groundbreaking site of the whole dot-com era: Zombocom!
siener's youtube channel
When I look at the list of dot coms there, I'm struck by the 'normality' of the offerings: pets, holidays, clothing etc.
These are all things that are sensible things to sell on the Internet - and if you compare them to some of the (relatively) completely off the wall offerings that we use on an everyday basis, they don't seem all that odd (or novel).
Maybe "too early for their time" is true, but too early in the sense that at that time the Internet had just emerged from a very geek world and everyone was just settling into the concept of using it for something else.
Books and second-hand crap (and of course porn) weren't really a problem for people. Maybe a dog was.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
How appropriate.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Remember VIOS? It was a first stab at being the metaverse inspired by 'Snowcrash'. It had billboards, property ownership (with auctions and prime locations), chat, the usual easy-to-implement stuff. Unfortunately it lacked the hard-to-implement stuff like avatars, voice chat, facial expressions, i.e. the things that online social communities actually want most.
I remember I visited its 'downtown' ("port zero" in Snowcrash terms) area. It was a clot of billboards for what were at the time the first net-aware businesses. There were lots of avatarless users roaming around but no social interaction. I considered buying a lot, speculately, and I'm glad I didn't. VIOS vanished without a trace shortly afterward.
Now that I think about it, the whole thing may have been a scam... but they must've put some serious effort into their rich client, because at the time it had a VR MMPOG interface of notable quality.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
You don't seem to understand. "Lack of advertising" in the context of dot-coms doesn't mean "we dot-coms should have advertised" but rather "damn, we thought people would pay millions to advertise on our site, and the bastards didn't." It's a different end of that shafting.
To recap, the dot-com bubble was started by greed over advertising money.
In the stone age of the Internet, sites had one ad banner on the front page. That was it. Not animated, not pop-up, no pop-under, and certainly not wall to wall. It also usually had something to do with the site's topic, e.g., a site about games, would likely had a banner to some games shop or publisher. It was easy to target those by hand since, well, you only had one and it stayed with you a long time.
And people actually tended to look at it, and occasionally even click on it. I mean, why not. We hadn't been flooded with ads yet and desensitized to the point where they're mentally filtered out.
And the ad rates were calculated for _that_ situation. A page view for your ad in those conditions was considered worth a lot. More importantly, the ratio between total ads shown and advertising budgets allowed quite a nice price per view. The pie was divided into a smaller number of slices, so to speak.
Unfortunately, that also gave some people the idea that, basically, they could make a site with 10 banners per page, and rake in tens to thousands of dollars (at those rates) per month for just being there. Heck, that there's even room for growth there. If you want twice as much money, just double the number of banners, and there you go, the ad provider surely will keep paying the same rate for them.
Whole sites were _designed_ to be little more than wall to wall ads, with a tiny frame in the middle for the actual content. Heck, I worked for one.
Others had no qualms to just lie to ad provider. (At first most sites hosted the banner themselves, so the ad provider had to just trust them that they actually had a trillion pages served last month.) Others used scripts to refresh the page in a loop, and/or to simulate a click on the ad if they were paid more for a click. Others urged their users to do that for them. Etc.
Basically a whole "industry" and a lot of financial analysts, built a model and started a bubble, based on little more than defrauding the ad providers. And on the bet that the ad providers were drooling retards, and wouldn't recalculate the rates. Most weren't even too secretive about their plans to abuse the system, and built whole projections for the next 20 years based on the underlying assumption that the rates would indeed stay the same, and the rest of the economy wouldn't react when that scam bleeds it dry.
Unfortunately, while the ad providers did react somewhat slower than expected (and it helped further "confirm" the belief that, yep, they're helpless and waiting to be fleeced), react they did. Among other things, because the actual companies advertising their products had a finite marketing budget. You couldn't tell them to pony up 100 times more money than last year, just because the number of ad banners on the web rose 100 times. Most didn't even have that kind of money.
And what happened was, well, basic economics. If there's the same X million dollars on the "demand" side for ad space, but the "supply" side has grown 100 times, then the price per banner dropped 100 times too. In fact, what happened eventually went even further than that, like often is the case in an overproduction situation. The old style plain banner views didn't just become 100 or 1000 times cheaper, they became outright worthless. The ad providers started wanting to buy better stuff instead, like better ads, or clicks instead of views, or unique users.
And that's when the dotcom's dreams of an endless stream of billions in advertising money, started going downhill. Almost none of them got as much advertising as they had built their business plan on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Even watching it go on live while I was in high school, it always struck me that a company that didn't actually sell anything was pretty much doomed to failure.
/you/ as their source for whatever stupid crap they were talking about, and then trying to sell ads to other companies...
.com boom? sun, cisco and whoever makes those aeron chairs -- 'cause they were actually selling stuff. ratemypetrock.com or whatever sort of ideas that people had failed because they were stupid.
Slopping some "information" up on a web page, hoping that enough people will "recognize" your "brand" and choose
who made out well from the
then again, I'm sure if I could have justified sporks as an "e-commerce solution," I could have been a billion heir for 15 minutes, too.
Back in 2000-2001, our Downside site ran an automatic predictor for dot-com failure. It was amazingly simple and painfully accurate. The system read through SEC filings, extracted the numbers for cash on hand and rate of losses, and projected when the cash would run out. We called that the "death date". That was a good predictor of when the company would go bust. This is a surprisingly good predictor for companies financed via an IPO. You can only IPO once (yes, secondary offerings are possible, but not when you're failing), so there's a finite amount of cash, and when it's gone, so is the company.
For Deathwatch purposes, "dead" was defined as "investors lost essentially all (90% or worse) of their investment". Some of the companies, like Dr. Koop, hung on for years, but their investors did not. (This, by the way, is a common phenomenon to venture capitalists. Many failing companies hang on as overfinanced small companies, downsized until they are able to make just enough money to cover current operating costs but not to recover their startup costs. VC's call these "zombies".) By our standards, essentially all the companies on the Industry Standard list died.
As so many learned (or at least heard) in the Dotcom Bubble, "there's nothing so permanent as a temporary solution".
--
make install -not war
dealnews.com (originally just deal-mac.com) is still alive and kicking. We are still doing what we did in 1997. We still have the same owners. (I was employee #3, the owners were #1 and #2). We did not burn through crap loads of other people's money. We did not hire a huge rock band for our company parties. We did not do any of those things that the failures (and sure, some of the success) did. Good business decisions for the win.
One major problem the early .com's faced was that it was hard to undercut the local brick and mortar store with the additional cost of shipping on top of it. It didn't matter if you could sell dog food $5/bag cheaper if it cost $20 to ship it and waiting 3-5 working days to actually get it wasn't either convienient or cost-effective. Between that and the fact that the consumer buying habits didn't change quickly enough (as you had lots of people without the internet, or those like my dad who are terrified to use their credit card online); They weren't doing enough sales (in volume) to fully utilize their capital investments (warehouse, infrastructure) or lower their shipping costs.
I still think to this day (having developed sites for companies and their affiliate agents) is that insurance is bar-none, the perfect B2C product for the internet, because essentially, you're using a similar program your agent is to get a quote and the insurance company only has to send a single post-letter (or in a lot of cases now, generate a PDF) to send your insurance card, policy number and policy documents. They avoid the high cost of warehousing and shipping which has allowed them to be incredibly profitable (and even reduce their brick and mortar presence in a lot of cases) simply by making a public version of the software they already have (with some features removed).
In any case, it is significantly easier to sell a good (such as insurance or a digital file) or service that doesn't involve a physical product if you're the one shouldering the responsibility of getting it to the customer's doorstep (unless you've got a great way of passing the cost on and still remain competitive or all your competitors have the same situation like a furniture store.)
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
My favourite:
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
In other words, reaching extinction. The death of the dot-coms was merely foreshadowing the collapse of IT in general overall, which explains the lack of tech companies around here.
There's a used office furniture store in Manchester, NH, filled with the office furniture from failed .coms. Of course, all the employees of the store have Herman Miller Aeron chairs. If you like leather and mahogany office furniture, this is the place to go!
Seasonticket.com was the dot com I worked with. Lots of money for an idea that wasn't going to fly at a time when broadband wasn't common. Management had some issues too. Firing your IT director and replacing him with a guy who guts the staff to give his buddies jobs probably isn't the best idea.
... that the guys from the crashed dot-coms were Stealing underpants
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That's the more interesting question to me, a lot of these web2.0 companies have strong links to dotcom era organizations. Sure there were the opportunists who learned basic html and worked in the tech business for a few years before heading elsewhere, but there are plenty of coders and business people who are more closely bound to tech. e.g. I know that many of the engineers from napster were all laid off on the same day and subsequently found themselves working together at companies like snocap, finetune, imeem, iTunes and others - staying in the music business (I don't think any actually went from Napster 1.0 to Napster 2.0)
Even back in the 90's I was going these are not High-Tech companies. They are just freaking Mailorder companies. That they had for hundreds of years. Except for Mailing or Telphoneing and seeing the description your order you did it via the web. But all in all it was just an other mail order company. The problem was people though it was some new way of doing things. It really wasn't Using the web is just an improvement of the Mail Order system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Webvan - "Drove off a cliff."
@Home - "Dug itself a nice hole with overloaded circuits and awful service."
The Webbies - "Fizzled after 3 years of glitz."
WorldCom - "Gross mismanagement and too much of the bubbly taken in by the accountants." They left behind a butt-load of dark fiber, most of which still is.
EToys - "Stock did a yo-yo from $80 on its IPO on October 1999, then was delisted at $1 Feb 2001 when they folded."
Enron - "Need I say more?"
As Warren Buffet said back in '01 "I Told You So".
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Thats pretty much standard for conventional underwriting. That all went out the door in the dot.com era. Valuations switched to revenue streams, which meant much less. Google waited until it had profits.
Amazon and Yahoo to name a couple.
No kidding. Some friends and I tried to start a digital music distribution .com in 1995 - this was years before Napster and mp3.com, a decade or more before iTunes et al. We had an end-to-end system sorted out - one-click download and burn to CD (this was way before portable .mp3 players), $1 songs, etc, etc. It was just WAY too early. None of us ever imagined the RIAA would have its head so obscenely far up its ass. Thankfully, we didn't burn through millions of other people's venture dollars - though the stories of meetings with those idiots are quite funny.
A-Bomb
For some reason I'm afraid to visit "justballs.com" to see if they're still selling . . . um . . . balls. To play with. You know, I feel like I'm just digging deeper here.
Anyway, if not, I can only speculate as to who might have been interested in that domain.
I know that facebook isn't making billions per year but enough investors feel that it has the future earnings potential so that its value IS in the billions, even if its not being realized in the present.
Investors also need to think about risk, and the risk that the Facebook platform will be replaced by something technologically better and more open is a near certainty, and it's very like that Facebook, as the established player, is going to miss the boat.
Back in the dot-com days, I remember that USA Today picked one company more or less at random to profile for 1 year. I do not remember the name of this company and when you read further, you'll understand why. Basically some MBA guy from Harvard (I think) got some crazy idea that re-designing a PC (Windows based) desktop to look like planets was just something that everybody had to have. He hired one of his fellow graduates to work with him on it and they got office space in San Francisco. They had few employees and those that they had got paid very little. Basically the idea was that you had different planets on your desktop to refer to different things and you could assign people and such to different planets. Like maybe you put an icon for your dad on Mars for example. They somehow got in touch with Patrick Stewart (Capt. Picard of Star Trek fame) and gave him some stock options to agree to be their company spokesperson and to be the voice on their automated phone system.
Needless to say, they had a hard time getting more money after the first initial "You're a dot-com? Let me throw money at you because you must be on to something great!" enthusiasm wore off. The idea was just stupid and I couldn't believe that 2 MBA graduates (non-techies you might note) honestly though that there was a need for such a thing. Eventually they went belly up. There was no big buyout before the bubble burst, they just failed.
Remember how Etoys.com legally bullied the long-standing artist group, etoy, over name similarity?
I do. Good riddance to them and their ilk.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/01/2156208&mode=thread
That's a nice way to think and I wish it were true for more than a select few. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080530/us_telecom_association_lobbying.html?.v=1 Spending $1.5 million on lobbying, in 3 months. Greed in action.
Let's put it another way, have your rates for your wireless phone gone down? Is there more competition in wireless or less in the last 10 years? Telco greed in action.
Unless you are still living in your parents basement, or get your pay check supplemented by the Bank of Mom and Dad, your ideals fail spectacularly when applied to the real world.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I ran The Sync.com, an Internet video company that among other things helped to launch and hosted the Slashdot "Geeks in Space" audio webcasts. We had some angel money from folks involved in early ISPs (who did make lots of money). We started getting serious ad revenue from banner ad sites in 1998, but by the end of 1999 the banner market collapsed. In 2000, we were in talks for a few months to be purchased by a company in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of dollars of lawyer time into the contract process, they pulled out, we went under, and shortly afterwards they went under as well.
Towards the end of 2000, I ended up working at SkyCache/Cidera a satellite provider of USENET feeds and streaming media distribution. Unfortunately, after raising $75 million, they also had challenges, two layoffs with 50% staff cuts each time (one was originally scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001, but had to be postponed), and eventually went under.
So I left the Internet, and made the transition to broadcast television engineering (where it is all going IP anyway)...
Whatever happened to flooz.com? That was my favorite...buy fake online currency with really money which later becomes worthless because no online shopping site accept flooz dollars.
"93. Y2K hysteria."
hysteria? Hysteria? no, there was a real issue, and it was fixed throughout the industry with a lot of hard work and money.
AS someone who watched banking systems completly collapse in spectacular ways in testing environments during rollover simulations, I would not call it hysteria. Yes, some people went overboard but as a whole it certianly wasn't a blunder, it was an amazing success.
Most of the things they talk about made perfect sense at the time, or were great ideas but the people in charge of the money didn't know what they were doing. And some were just plain dumb.
The whole list is a failed attempt to try and make people thing they are smart.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Anyone remember this? And the spiel she had about how huge her company would be? I believe an IPO was mentioned.
Ah the days of reading F*ckedCompany religiously.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
http://zombo.com/ !!
.. this was a really dull article. It sounded interesting... but I literally had to try very hard to get through it.
I think it's because it's basically the same story over and over again, with the names and numbers changed. That, and the basic premise, "where are they now", is pretty boring.
I`ll save you all the trouble:
The started well, got a metric ass-tonne of venture capital, failed because they tried to grow way too fast, and now the CEOs are now doing quite well for themselves as consultants at companies you have never even heard of and probably don`t care about.
You just touched on a topic of valuation, that is how valuable a company or business is. From your argument you're falling into the "book value" kind of valuation or something similar. But if everything was so easily valued just from something like P/E then why would people buy stock in companies with high P/Es like Google and Apple? Based on their P/Es, these investors won't be getting their return until 40 years out.
There is a lot more to valuation than cash flow, profit, revenue, and stock price. In fact, stock price is already a form a valuation on its own (market value). And unfortunately there is no proven way to determine the value of a company. Everyone has their methods and arguments but there is no equation you can write into excel that will tell you how valuable your company is compared to what everyone else thinks.
The reason why people are valuing facebook at such a high price is not because of current revenue but because of current market share. Facebook currently has the highest market share compared to all other social networks today and it is still growing. So despite all the news about Zuckerberg and his success (or lack of), what investors and other companies see in facebook is a web based company that has millions of hits everyday. Everyone is banking on the idea that if there was some sort of way to turn those hits into profit, then the company would take off. Zuckerberg doesn't even have to maintain a huge profit, just enough to cover and maintain market share growth and he could probably still keep the company valued at such a high price on market share alone.
You may not agree with that train of thought, but apparently there are many others who disagree with you and are willing to throw huge amounts of money at facebook just to get a piece of the equity. It works the same with other elements of business like patents and people (who's behind you). If you've got Warren Buffett on your board, people will automatically value you higher. If you have a patent that can lock out your competitors and the legal means to make it happen, people will value you higher. All of these different factors play in the valuation of a company.
You seem to think that "making as much money as possible for your shareholders" is destructive greed. It is not.
Let's put it another way, have your rates for your wireless phone gone down? Is there more competition in wireless or less in the last 10 years? Telco greed in action.If my cost to provide a service goes down, yet the market still bears the original price, why exactly would I lower what I charge for it? If anything, this is a problem with competition in the industry (or inflation), not "greed" on the part of the company.
Likewise, spending money on lobbying isn't greedy. It may be dubiously ethical, but spending money in order to get legislation passed that is favorable to your corporation can only be good for shareholders (who are the people the company is responsible for enriching).
In short, it seems that you are the one who doesn't quite get how the real world works.
Forget "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters".
Let's Try: "Slashdot. Your one-stop source of legal, financial, and romantic advice since 1997."
In the US, with Verizon, I get three times as many minutes now for the same rate I paid five or six years ago. So, my rates have gone down. I could lower the actual monthly bill by downgrading my plan, but I choose to make the same payment and use more minutes.
So your point is? Phone service should be free as in beer?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Remember Eazel? The company Andy Hertzfeld started in 1999 to bring Linux to the desktop. They burned through millions and only produced a friggin bloated and buggy file manager.
This also reminds me of Lokigames.
No more animated GIFs and embedded sounds. All tabs and Flash.
I was surprised Weekly Standard was still around too..
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Well, I have unlimited data and more minutes than I'd ever use in a month. The texts are limited, but I can send emails to other people and they get them as texts. I pay less now than I did for my bag phone back in the day.
I'd say, yes. I am paying less and the competition has been responsible for that.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I'm of the firm conviction that the number of employees at dotcoms who actually were smart computer folks was very small.
There's no small number of people who learned a little bit of HTML and not much else in the dot-com era, who were laid off once the bubble burst and were unable and/or unwilling to expand their skill set and remain in the industry.
Ask any competent techie who was working during the dot-com bubble, and they'll tell you that the number of people who had no business being in tech (and, make no mistake, those people are still here today, just in much lower numbers) was incredibly high.
I get three times as many minutes now for the same rate I paid five or six years ago.
Ohhh you've got me there! Oh wait, you don't.
A market that displays -some- competition would have resulted in far cheaper wireless service to date.
If you took the time to examine the issue, you might find, in real dollars, your wireless bill has not fallen at the rate of most competitive markets. Groceries come to mind.
It's not your fault you don't objectively examine your costs. It's also probably the case you are relatively satisfied with the service. That satisfaction influences your sense of value.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
If my cost to provide a service goes down, yet the market still bears the original price
Which it won't. Ever.
get legislation passed that is favorable to your corporation
And the legislation would be unfavorable to whom exactly? Fairies? Ignore for a moment the competitors that the telcos harm by burdening their competitors with legislated costs/litigation/etc. Consumers are still *directly* harmed. Consumers pay higher prices and get less utility because there is less competition!
If that's okay with you, then your morals allow for more inequity and general harm to consumers than mine. That's okay.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I notice you casually forget the second half of the question. There's far less competition in wireless now than in the past. That is an incontrovertible fact.
That you are satisfied enough with your wireless service has affected your perception of value. If you could examine the issue more objectively, you would find the cost of wireless in real dollars hasn't fallen very far. Certainly less than commodities in competitive markets over the same time period.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I met with many serious/pro developers and when you speak about Linux to them, Eazel is always mentioned as a legend. As I use Mac, they are all Mac developers too, you know their attitude against Linux and UI.
:)
If we trust to Wikipedia:
"Eazel's main achievement was the new Nautilus file manager for the GNOME desktop environment.[3] Its business plan involved monetizing online services to be offered through Nautilus such as storage, but it failed to do so before venture capital ran out."
Another 56K modem failure? You know you could start Youtube back in 1999 but nobody could use it except companies/universities. Don't forget the FBI knocking your door with 20 Hollywood lawyers too
You seem to imply that there is no middle ground. Either the nerds go out & buy Ferraris the week before it all comes crashing down, or they stay on well after it's clear the business model is a failure and bleed the financials dry. Quick death vs. slow bleed. IMO, both of these situations constitutes theft and are immoral.
The third option ("responsible entrepreneur"):
Dotcomm-er sees that the business isn't going to pan out and fulfills his duty to the investors by informing them of that fact ASAP, thus allowing them to make an informed decision about whether to close up shop immediately (e.g. liquidate remaining assets), change course, or ride this pony 'till it falls over.
Anything less is irresponsible and criminal.
I think that currently, the internet is in a computer virus bubble. The Corporations want you infected with their computer viruses, (mostly by insisting you use IE on Windows.) the Botnet Herders want you infected with their viruses and The virus scanner makers want you to have something to be afraid of so they can sell you anti-virus software.
In this economy if you use a secure browser, or a secure OS you are "punished" as a consumer for preventing them from infecting you. And if you find a way of destroying the infection, you are called a thief.
I'm sorry but that business plan is classic "2. ??? 3. Profit".
My guess is that the real plan was to wait for the Linux Desktop to explode in popularity and then sell the people to RedHat or someone.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually, yes, I did. Once you get past the first 3 or 4 pages which actually had a product, you run even there into examples like TheGlobe.com who had _no_ business plan other than being a social site, and no way to monetize on the user base. Other than serving ads on their web pages, there was no other source of income. In Paternot's own words, and it's right in TFA, " way too little advertising revenues to support everyone ". So there you have exactly what I was saying, right from TFA, and from the horse's mouth.
Later in the list: DrKoop.com. From TFA: " DrKoop.com's business plan rested on advertising, and in 1999 there weren't enough healthcare advertisers to support it and the many other healthcare dot-coms trolling for ad buyers. "
Those are the only ones explicitly mentioning advertising as a factor, and they're both in the "we didn't get enough ad money" category I was describing. Neither of them says that they themselves didn't advertise enough.
But anyway, that's one list, and it just presents a debatable sample of it all. The "we'll get billions in ads" plan, although somewhat under-represented in that particular list, was actually the story of about 90% of the dot-coms back then. And as I was saying, I had the pleasure of actually working for one which had even less of a business plan.
Lack of their _own_ advertising? Heh. Where did you get that idea from TFA? The companies picked there are the ones which were maybe the best known back then, precisely because they advertised and built a lot of hype. The Pets.com sockpuppet from their ads is pretty much _the_ reason we all remember that one, out of the tens of thousands of dot-con flops.
So, heh, did _you_ read TFA? Doesn't sound like it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Let's add a column to your list...
80's - S&L, Junk bonds. Result: Government Bailouts.
90's - Dot Coms. Result: No Government involvement.
00's - Housing/Mortgages/Junk bonds. Result: Government Bailouts.
I think it's high time for me to get out of the IT industry and into finance.
At first their office and server were together in a windowless closet in downtown Santa Cruz, California, just on the other side of the wall (and a short ethernet run) from Scruz.Net, the first commercial ISP in Santa Cruz.
They later expanded to about twenty-five employees and a nice office. I worked there for a time as a web programmer.
Chris and Thomas sold out to Verio. Chris' take was six million dollars. Thomas invested his share in two new dot-coms that failed, so that he wound up looking for sysadmin jobs again.
Chris did what most would say was the smart thing and retired. I didn't see him for a long time, until I came across him riding a mountain bike when I was hiking in the woods at UC Santa Cruz. I envied him for his apparently happy life.
One day, Chris was turned away from a psychiatric hospital because he was considered not sick enough to hospitalize. This is actually a very common problem - mental health is a popular victim of budget cuts, so there are never enough beds for all the potential patients.
The next day he blew his brains out.
It is thought that he was an undiagnosed manic-depressive.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
"I notice you casually forget the second half of the question. There's far less competition in wireless now than in the past. That is an incontrovertible fact."
Really? I see a lot more competition in the market than there used to be. Pay as you go has forced contract companies to actually provide some real services and made people much more aware of how much they pay for a minute of talking. Sure, since the AAT&T/Cingular and Sprint/Nextel mergers there are less of the old school heavies in wireless, but balanced with the fact that there are now a huge number of independents (not to mention companies like Alltel who use a similar model to the old contract dinosaurs) selling prepaid that more than balances out.
In any case, if mobile phones cost a fraction of what they used to, and the service offered is exponentially greater, how exactly do you see the price going up?
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
You certainly can invest without doing any valuation (a bad idea in my opinion but that's a different discussion) but ultimately someone somewhere has to do the work of trying to figure out what the investment is worth. Technical analysis is rooted in mass psychology and trying to use statistical tools to (hopefully) find patterns in behavior. I think it works sometimes but I don't really believe it's possible to consistently make market beating results with it.
I think that you summed it up pretty well, there. I was reading the articles, and over and over again, these companies got, maybe 200 Million in funding and IPO cash, then tried to build a billion-dollar infrastructure and offices in 10 cities in 1 or 2 years. Then, shock! they ran out of money before they finished building. It reminds me of the first few times I tried to play SimCity, and went bust because I tried to grow too fast, without developing enough revenue base in the city. At some point you have to figure out that, with this amount of money, I can afford to spend this amount of it on growth, then need to save the rest of it to cover costs until I can achieve profitability. Be profitable for a couple years, which proves the business model has a fighting chance to succeed, then go back to investors for a much larger amount of money to resume growing.
Of the founders, many were able to cash out early and/or achieve later online success
Boo.com, an online clothing retailer that burned through $125 million in funding
Why isn't Congress holding hearings on this? Why aren't they going after Big Computer, or Big Interweb?
My rate for my cell phone haven't gone down, but I spend $5/month because I have a prepaid phone, whereas most people pay more than an order of magnitude more than that.
Right here.
Have gnu, will travel.
i just love how people hold google responsible with standards that they do not hold any other company, or even country, responsible with.
'complying with censorship in totalitarian regimes' - jesus - many long standing companies are actually SUPPLYING those totalitarian regimes with the tools to conduct their repression for 50 years and more. almost all big companies have been doing business in many such repressive regimes. even building prisons on contract for them.
in addition, those companies do not act in the interest of the people and the consumers where they can either. at&t for example, still tries to totally kill the internet by removing net neutrality, comcast throttles traffic ILLEGALLY for its own ends without even fearing laws in its homeland.
google at least does not screw people over anywhere it can. if you put google's 'vice' against the mountainous heap of shit that i described above, it doesnt even get noticed.
Read radical news here
i would choose a captain that would go down with his/her ship, rather than choose a 'surfer' that would screw me in the back, for my business.
Read radical news here
Um, enriching your shareholders at the cost of general public, by using any means necessary is often destructive to the environment, society, employees and more. And since corporations cannot have morals, and can go around laws or change laws at will, there is nothing to stop them from doing evil. So it IS destructive.
And most of the time, this kind of greed is short-sighted, and harmful to shareholders as well.
--Coder
"I'd say, yes. I am paying less and the competition has been responsible for that."
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I too worked at Webcom from 1997 to 2000. Thomas didn't throw all of his money away. He gave 10% of away to the old employees the day Webcom was sold to Verio. I still have the hand written letter he wrote to me thanking me, and my school loans were paid off that same day!
First off, consumers are not 4 year olds, they're adults.
Secondly, your idea that all business works like telecoms is... problematic. The buy-in for a new telecom is prohibitive, as they're akin to being an infrastructure company (say, if there were 3 major companies making roads). Now, if the charging for the roads was unreasonable, there'd be a problem. Similarly, if phone charges were unreasonable, there'd be a problem. However, the market determines that, not you here on slashdot.
Third, I'm not sure what you mean by "would be unfavorable to whom, exactly?" Is it your position that corporations should never be able to lobby for legislation? Ever? Isn't the real problem that congress-critters pay them undue attention?
Fourth, my morals (such as they are) are irrelevant to the legalities of the current American business climate. So are yours.