The Greatest Defunct Websites and Dotcom Disasters

NotableCathy writes "CNet has an interesting retrospective write-up documenting the most notable dotcom disasters and now-defunct Websites that were massive in their day, detailing what happened to them and what they led to. Nupedia didn't escape a slating (remember Larry Sanger's memoir?), or indeed Beenz, whose founder and CEO once said 'would become the universal currency, supplanting all others,' according to The Register seven years ago."

Comments

Pets.com

[oahazmatt]

I remember the Pets.com sock-puppet.

Then I remember a commercial for "Bar None" credit, where an astoundingly similar sock-puppet declares "because everyone deserves a second chance".

I have no idea if that was intentional or not, but it still makes me laugh to this day.

Re:Pets.com

[IorDMUX]

There was a similar (Amazon?) super-bowl commercial that showed the company's mascot riding on a donkey through a silicon-valley-esque ghost town of boarded up offices, broken glass, and whitewashed signs where only the ".com" was visible. On his way out of town, the mascot came across the limp Pets.com sock puppet (with X's for eyes) blowing in the wind. The commercial ended with a suggestion to trust the stable, surviving business [or something along those lines].

...so yeah. Obviously my memory is a bit faulty; this is one of my all-time favorite commercials, even if I can't remember the sponsoring company. Does anyone remember this commercial? Can someone fill in the blanks, here?

Re:Pets.com

[myth_of_sisyphus]

I worked at Pets.com.

We had a huge number of orders from Alaska. I wondered why this was and checked out the orders. They were all mostly for 50 lb bags of dog food. And we offered free shipping. To Alaska. For 50 lb bags. I mentioned to someone that the shipping costs as much as the dog food. They stopped doing that.

And then I worked in customer support for a few weeks--that was lovely. People called all the time asking us complicated dietary questions. And pet health questions. Ones that would stump a vet. It baffled me every time. Why would you put your beloved pets health into a guy on the phone from a web page selling dog toys?

And one woman called from New York. She ordered a 50 lb bag of dog food and she said it was sitting outside in the hallway and what were going to do about that? I asked if she could get a neighbor to pick it up and bring it inside. She said "This is New York, nobody knows their neighbors." Then I said "I can get UPS to pick it up and return it to us." And she said "that would be fine. How long would it take?" I said "4 to 6 weeks." And she screamed at me. Prolonged screaming. I gave her to somebody else.

A kid from an elementary school asked me how to tell if a rabbit was a boy or a girl. I found a good web page on "sexing rabbits." (Which is what the procedure is called.) I sent the link to the kid and I got called into an office and asked "why am I sending 'sex with rabbits' webpages to kids? I just received an angry call from a parent." I showed her the webpage--it was not 'having sex with rabbits' but 'how to sex rabbits' and showed a bunch of rabbit private part's pictures. I was off the hook.

I miss Dejanews

[tmark]

I know that Google took it over and still makes Usenet content searchable, but a part of me pines for the simple days when it was Usenet that contained the useful technical information we needed, and when Dejanews was the best way to get to it.

Coincidentally...

[Otter]

GMail just served me up an ad for the book by a founder of theglobe.com. For the youngsters, previous dot-com IPO hysteria had centered on companies like Netscape, which had products, if not necessarily a reasonable business plan. theglobe.com, a useless website that no one could explain exactly what it did, was worth $600 million at the end of its first day, breaking the first-day runup record previously held by the Broadcast.com IPO that left Mark Cuban as a permanent pain in the ass of our society. Henceforth, any idiot with a domain name and a copy of PageMill thought he should be a billionaire.

Anyway, the founder wrote a book.

ClubCastLive

[SIGBUS]

I miss clubcastlive.com - it had live webcasts of bands at various clubs in Austin, TX. Shortly after they appeared on one of the morning TV news programs, they vanished from the web - and the domain eventually got snagged by a squatter.

I think bandwidth costs ate them alive - they streamed in 112 kbps MP3. I managed to snag a few shows before they went Tango Uniform.

CNet

[truthsearch]

I'm surprised CNet't not defunct. So many parts of their sites are very hard to look at, including this one. It's a shame because I always felt they had such potential, but I really can't browse their sites. It's still hard to understand why CBS valued them so high with their purchase.

mp3.com

[alan_dershowitz]

Where the heck is mp3.com, the bright, shining, and defunct future of music distribution? I still have probably a thousand of free MP3s of cool bands I found through that site.

Remember...

[SGDarkKnight]

AdCritic.com it was one of the best internet sites for getting all the lastest (and funniest) commericals from around the world. I remember when they closed down their site, they just got to big too fast and couldn't support themselves anymore... too bad, it was definatly one of the best.

Don't forget Pixelon

[futuresheep]

http://www.theindustrystandard.com/article/0,1902,14183,00.html $35 million from investors, and a $10 million launch party featuring acts like The Who, The Dixie Chicks, Kiss, and Brian Setzer. All this for a streaming video service that never worked so at demos they used a custom front end for Windows Media Services.

Re:Thank God

[E IS mC(Square)]

Well, one of the guys who made millions in the dot com boom is now making sure there are no more 9/11 disasters by writing books on terrorism: Craig Winn of ValueAmerica.

Read dot.bomb by David Kuo - a very interesting insider look into what all went wrong in a typical dot.com company.

Like most, they misunderstand Webvan

[garyrich]

Maybe it's that the UK is too far away or that the writer doesn't get it personally. "Web site that sold groceries " was never the business model. They did that, but to paraphrase JFK "not because it's easy, but because it's hard". Once you can perfect getting fresh peaches delivered via an Internet order, everything else is easy.

They were a tiered distribution company. They would have become a combination of Wal-Mart without the storefronts and UPS. Their two edges were

1) dis intermediate all the retail outlets that all sell the same things. The profit margin in groceries is razor thin (again, they did the hard thing first). Eliminate the stores and employees, replace them with largely automated warehouses and drivers and you change the entire profit dynamic. Walmart.com and vons.com don't get this benefit since they still have to support physical storefronts. Amazon gets this benefit and does pretty well. People have figured out by now that Amazon isn't just an internet bookstore, Webvan died before it could get there.

2)Use the internet as the front end of the business. That's pretty obvious.

"Webvan -- none of whose senior executives or investors had any experience in the supermarket trade". Umm... yeah, that experience would have been useless since they didn't run supermarkets. They did have one of the main architects of Walmarts inventory and distribution system. They were damn good at what they did. If they had an unhappy customer I never met him.

They died from dried up funding more than overspending (though they did that too). They were just about at the point of doing the "since we have a truck coming by your house anyway, why don't we also drop off your Netflix movie, next semester's textbooks and that creepy Rei Ayanami doll you ordered from Japan?". Without that Netflix has had to spend huge effort to get a (kick ass frankly) distribution system done via USPS. Amazon has their affiliate program where you can get all sorts of odd stuff from Amazon, but they don't have that "last mile" solved. If you order stuff in one order from 7 different affiliates you have to pay 7 different shipping fees and deal with 7 different shipments from different shipping companies. At least one of those shipments will get screwed up and one other will come from some shipper that won't leave it without a signature. Webvan was coming by your house anyway to drop off your groceries.

And, yes, I did indeed ride a small position in WBVN all the way to $0.00. They could have been saved at any point and I still think they would be a huge company today.

Re:Thank God

[Z34107]

Now, being a CEO is (really) different from managerial work, but I have an anecdote.

My dad works for Proctor & Gamble. They hire almost exclusively engineers for every position. They figure it's easier to teach an engineer sales/managing/whatever than it is to teach a business type how to engineer. Heck, they pay for some people to get their MBAs - if you could handle an engineering degree, you sure as heck can handle business.

Maybe not many geeks have business acumen - but it seems to be easier to pick up than geekery.