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What it takes to be a profitable Internet company
Zebulun writes "The Red Herring has a really good article that basically examines what it takes to have a profitable internet company and why so few make it. " I think investors are expecting this more and more-the next few years will see some shake outs, something which has already begun to happen. The question is, who will be left standing?
Exactly - it shouldn't be hard to see that one competent UNIX admin costs less that 5 MCSEs.
What is Amazon worth, REALLY? ... that's what the whole idea of price determination through supply and demand boils down to really.
That's a really good question. What is anything worth really? Perhaps the answer is simple: anything is worth exactly as much as people think it is
AMEN
IIRC, about half of the new noise came from AOLers who didn't know better, and the other half was people complaining about the AOLers increasing noise. Sure, the AOLer's were often dumb. And they definitely increased the noise on UseNet. But the people flaming them for doing that increased the noise just as much, while inciting more nonsense -- and they are the ones who should have known better.
/. uselessly declaring that "the quality of posts is decreasing" posts as I do so-called "low-quality" posts.
See a metaphor here? I see just as many posts on
The inevitable occasional uninformed/childish posts will always be there, since this is a public forum.. so what I'd like to see is those posts followed by complete silence -- to keep from encouraging them -- or responded to by a knowledgeable person providing useful information (denewbiefication) without calling anyone names. Complaining about the noise is just part of increasing it, my friend.
1) Don't dare try to install NT with more than 3 logical drives. It will only let you use 1GB of the primary drive.
Care to explain, then, the NT box I have on my desk? It has a 6 GB C: drive / partition formatted NTFS. Yup, one piece. It's an EIDE drive in a removable case. Then, there are 3 more EIDE units before I get to the 2 IBM SCSI units. That doesn't even count my CD and CDR, and then there's the SyJet... That's nine physical units, with the potential for many more logical drives. I have the full capacity available on all my drives, and I've never had a problem.
2) Don't ever start up NT with one of your external RAID arrays unattatched. It will basically list the drives as offline, and won't let you do shit about it until you recreate the RAID container. And for the RAID unwashed out there, that means you gotta wipe the drives.
You're right, this can be a pain. It is possible to recover from it. With Disk Administrator, (under the Start / Programs / Administrative Tools (Common) menu), select all the drives that are affected. Select "Configuration > Restore". NT will now ask you for the disk that has your config on it. You do have a backup of your RAID config, right? Wait for it to finish grinding on the floppy, then NT will ask you to -- you got it! -- reboot.
If the server is a new install, you'll probably have to go in and replace all the permissions on the files in the array. If you don't, you'll most likely get a "Device not ready, RETRY / CANCEL" message box. This can be rather confusing... it's the same message you get when you try to access the floppy or CD drive and there's no media in it...
I'll agree with what you said about weird problems. It can take way too long to establish exactly what's causing NT to puke. Been there, done that, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt... and a head-start (pun intended) on grey hair.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
oh calm down - selling out _is_ the best internet business model...thats no dis to Taco..
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
and how exactly does this differ from current internet businesses?
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
yeah i have to agree....i liked /. better when it wasnt so popular (and i was an AC). unfortunately there seems to be an influx of idiots.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
A few points to make: One of the first things to remember when making claims such as this is "propogation of effects." While a choice may appear to be the more financially beneficial one at first, the effects of that choice may very well end up costing you lots and lots of money -- and that's definitely not a good thing (I think we can all agree on that.)
For example,
Don't use Oracle...
Okay, so it may initally cost effective not to use Oracle because the help is more expensive and the license costs an arm and a leg, but you have to think about what happens when you launch your website. IMHO, Oracle running on a Sun or similar *NIX box is inherently more stable and will provide better performance than MS SQL on an NT box. If my website is /.'ed the first day it goes live, survives the onslaught (where MS SQL would choke and die,) I think that extra $$$ is well worth it. I think the shareholders would agree as well.
Don't use Unix (any flavor)...
Again - think about it. IMHO, a Unix-based box will crash less and handle a higher load than a similarly equipped MS SQL box (sure -- if you give MS SQL twenty clustered 4-way Xeon boxes it can handle a high load, but there goes your next years' profit out the window when you need to buy a room at Exodus and hire 5 full-time admins to keep it alive - by clicking checkboxes, of course)
Don't support Linux (yet)....
I'm not going to touch this with a 20-foot pole....:)
In the end, the cost of your consultants and the initial fixed cost of the software/hardware itself can nicely be offset by the amount of money you'll save in the future by having a fast, stable website that doesn't crash and makes the users happy. And what does that get you (assuming you have an idea that doesn't suck?) -- $$$.
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
okay its _really_ ridiculous to moderate this comment down.
p.s. the reason porn companies arent public yet is that the regulatory environment is up in the air. the moment the gov't defines the rules for online porn will be the moment seth warshevsky (sp?) is the next dot com billionaire.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
to quote mutual fund investors "past performance is no guarantee of future results." that said, "platform" companies like Yahoo or Cisco probably will enjoy incredible performance in the future...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Caught me. My Pierre Sallinger filter was down at the time.
1000 SlashDot sigs
Yes, but you need a big server if you're going to get a few hits a day... more to the point, you're into mod_perl and mod_ssl instead of perl and apache-ssl, for starters, and probably some fine-tuning for performance.
:8]
...And some people to look after it all.
Alternatively you could "out-source" some of the processing requirement by doing JDBC from client browsers.
I'm sure there's still something more to it though.
Oh yes, *cookies*! Got it, now
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
No industry, the auto industry or any other industry has ever made a profit. Individuals and companies, yes. The whole point of this so called profitability is cash flow and you're dip into it. The overall cost of business, from environment to bad investments, it's relationship to Incorporation aka CorpGovLLC is totally constructed to enslave workers, siphon off as much money you can pocket to yourself and your gang (stockholders), which help you control your portion of the street. All while the real cost of oil spills, S&L bailouts and tobacco lawyering deals is for the profit of the barons. CorpGovLLC is "private profit, public risk". We, the public, built the highway system GM uses to drive it's business. Right here at home, the Internet was built with public funds, now CorpGovLLC thinks it's time for you to hand it over. All highways are built, not so we can get to town meeting halls, rather, town shopping malls. Try it any other way and you'll find military check points on your FREEway. Go out, stay in, whatever! Just buy something dagnabit!
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Let's face there's not a lot on the internet that anyone will pay good money for.
Who clicks on banners?
E-Commerce: Where's the advance on a good catalog/mail ordering service apart from industries such as books and music where there is such a huge range. When I buy a car, I want a test drive..
I think the internet needs a 'killer' app but if knew what it was, I wouldn't be sitting here sending this E-mail.`
Sorry Bill, sounds interesting, but I *still* won't work on Windows 2000.
Something like less than 5% of all companies survive their first 5 years. Most just plain fail. Internet companies just fail more publicly, with a few million spectators, instead of a few thousand.
A winning company has to have a product or service that enough people want, and management that knows how to keep up with the demand.
Pin the spig.
Provided moderation is doing its job, useless /.-ers will set their
off-topic threads will be down-moderated.
Experienced (and tired)
thresholds higher, and the noise will decrease
in their eyes. Newbies are left with a free-for-all
high-noise forum until they learn to raise
thresholds and order by score -- thus a true
newbie won't find much useful here until he
learns (& desires) to filter out the junk.
The only problem I see, though, is that with
increased volume more moderator points have to
be spent filtering off-topic posts and trolls,
meaning that fewer are left to award to the
good posts. Every time I've moderated I have
always felt more like rewarding the good than
filtering the bad (due to the limit of 5 points)
and so a "0" or "1" point crap post stays that
way.
I have a feeling the moderators need more points
(or there need to be more moderators) --
perhaps based upon the comment volume / day.
CmdrTaco - are you listening?
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
I would think something like this would only fly
///jeff
in a very technical savvy location. I work for an
ISP in Dayton, Ohio and know how low the number
of technical users are. Now, admittedly, they are
alot more invisible than the problem cases (and
there are plenty of those [dumb users]), but the
number of them Could Not keep the isp afloat even if it were only one person maintaining the hardware. Silicon valley? Dunno, ask me when I live there, but in the midwest... Naaaaah.
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Linux user: if (nt = unstable) switchTo.linux();
Even if an internet company can make a profit, what keeps two people from leaving and starting a competing company the next day??
Injured Software engineer fights back against Mattel!
My comment is offtopic. The above comment is as on-topic as one could be. I think this is possibly the worst moderation I have ever seen.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
I visited your web site, and it looks like all your products are free - so how did you make $37.20?
Maybe you need to make products for Linux? My impression is that the Windows market for what you're producing is pretty much saturated, thus the low revenues. Unfortunately, Linuxoids want it all for free.
You might want to consider BeOS - there aren't that many people buying it, true, but those who do are comfortable with paying for software.
D
----
No one vendor--even MS--will make you profitable. I'll make some suggestions, but first an obeservation:
Let's see, just how profitable is Microsoft's portal business? Hint: it isn't. Compare them with Yahoo!, which is profitable (and has been for some time). Guess which one uses Unix? (FreeBSD, to be exact.) Guess which one is located in the SF Bay Area?
Here's my list:
Failing in any one of these areas--hiring, customer relations, planning, risk management--can doom you no matter how good your marketing plan is. Yet the overwhelming number of Internet startups I've seen have come up short in one of these areas--and more than a few are already gone.
Its certainly relevant. This moderation is getting out of control, I can barely keep track of the threads, and some of the moderation is starting to show bias. Time to revoke moderation.
"NT for successful businesses" my a**, last time I saw NT running in a company, it was used for a Mail/Web/DNS/Proxy-Server - every time the proxy server crashed (several times every day), it took down all other services with it...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
What an odd post. If it weren't for the San Francisco point I'd think it a simple troll. Anyway...
There are plenty of non-Oracle, non-MS database managers. There are lots of cheaper RDBMSs than Oracle too. Most people don't need the sort of scalability SQL Server provides, let alone Oracle.
[This stuff gets almost on-topic by the bottom, you know. No, really.]
ROTFL. Having a GUI interface to configuration settings does not magically make the configuration settings easy to choose. A single clicked checkbox out of place could nadger the system just as easily as a line wrong in a .rc file. And a really knackered NT system means you have to reinstall the whole OS and all your apps all over again. I can cause this situation just be installing and de-installing parts of NT Option Pack - great eh?
Try, GUI interfaces could provide a nice, friendly, safe-ish interface to configuration. But Microsoft don't use them like that. They use them to hide your settings away in the registry and metabase, rather than have them available in a textfile. So if you want to get the settings out and move to another platform - or just keep your settings over yet another OS reinstall - you are screwed. You are locked in not only to MS software, but one MS box too.
[Don't believe me? I can get this on topic by the end. Betcha.]
Really. Odd, then, that you choose to list all the major systems that aren't by Microsoft and manage to systemically diss them without justification. I mean what's this all about:
Obviously this makes no sense (how does having icons make one anti-MS?) but you also forgot to tie it into the theme for today, namely What it takes to be a profitable company on the internet.
And the answer, of course, is this:
Get yourself bought out by Microsoft.
Or any other big internet company. AOL is good. But Microsoft is still best.
You can't really make much of a profit on a purely internet business at this point in time. But if you create an innovative new bit of kit you can get Microsoft or one of Microsoft's enemies to buy it to use in their little fight. Then cash in your MS shares and take a nice holiday.
That is all.
[Once again, I win. Give me yoghurt!!]
Linux's ability to run well on cheaper hardware is one point I've never seen anyone disagree on, and from personal experience this holds true as well.
and NOT hit a portal or a search engine, so I must disagree. You may not have seen any of the internet advertising trade rags, but look at http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctf519.htm for a good article on the subject.
/coming/ to the site? How do you get those who have been to the site to come back regularly? How do you know your audience?
/., and now they are junkies who have passed the URL on to others.
/. . You can see that the vast majority of the viewers here are computer savvy, male, and based on a poll I recall seeing the majority are in the continental United States.
:) Take with as many grains of salt as you like.
Unless you can spend the $$$ on an inside sales team to bring in the ad dollars another portal is a bad idea. Most internet users have become savvy enough to not use them OR already have their favorite and pass that information on to those friends/family who are newbies. If you look at how many portals have sprung up over the last year only to vanish or be abandoned, you'll see that it is a lot more than Database + CGI scripts = Money (and marketing). OK, so you market like crazy, bring in the eyeballs, but how do you keep them at the site and keep them
/. is a prime example of a site which could be/is a success.
Marketing/bringing in new viewers: The best way in the world, word of mouth and links (i.e. FREE). I found this site from a link at Mac OS Rumors http://www.macosrumors.com , and I have hooked half the geeks here up with
Keeping viewers coming back: Two words, ya'll, frequent updates. If you have a site and you only update once a month, unless it is a really really hot topic those people who have visited once or twice won't be back again.
Know the audience: Well, look at this board and at the polls that are done, and look at the articles posted at
Another way to make money on the web, keep it original and free. By original I don't mean something that no one else has done, I mean your own content. Sure there are sites that syndicate their content, but why should an advertiser pay you higher CPM's/CPC's for content that isn't yours? Why should a company or person pay for a sponsorship on a site that frames someone else's efforts?
And I suggest free because if you are selling the info/files/images chances are someone is giving them away at another URL or in a news group.
Of course after a while if there are a huge number of sites all offering the same services/content the value will go down, but those sites that make efforts to stand out will make the best buckage.
Just my 2 bits
Killing spammers is too good for them.
I have bought a few things from internet traders, and I`m very reluctant to do so again. Why? They expect me to sit in all day waiting for it to arrive! I`m sure it can`t be hard to say `It`ll arrive at about three-ish` and stick to it, thus enabling me to get to work in the morning. Better, I could specify when I want it to arrive, and they could arrange it so that it arrived within an hour of that time. Until they do this, then home delivery is an inconvenience rather than a convenience, and it`s far easier to buy things from the high street like everyone else.
I do not think you can put Yahoo and Cisco in the same boat.
Yahoo is a pure internet company, Cisco is far from it.
A company like Cisco, which supplies much of the backbone and the "means" of the Internet has a much more solid foothold. While Yahoo has name recognition, I would not bet that they will be around ten years from now (though it certainly is possible).
For every company that has established a name for itself on the Internet, there are hundreds more each week that are coming out with the same products or services. The barriers to entry are that low. Already we are seeing some Internet companies give service away for free, planning on relying completely on advertising. That is not a strong business plan in my opinion.
Another problem with pure internet companies is that while there is some loyalty, a better price on exactly the same service or product is only a "click" away.
While this is wonderful for consumers, it makes it very dificult for the companies.
Personally, I believe that the companies that make it will be the late-comers. Portals will be owned by "established" companies (many, such as Infoseek and Altavista already are). AT&T and Microsoft will become the largest ISP's. Wall Mart, Toys R Us, Barnes & Nobles, etc... will become the largest goods providers on the Internet.
These companies have the revenues and profits to support a losing game like the Internet.
Venture Capitalists throwing money left and right to anything with a "dot com", and insanely high stock prices are not going to last forever. The profits have to be there.
I admit it: amazon.com have my loyalty. It's for one simple reason, a $20 order didn't arrive, and when I contacted them they upgraded the shipping (from about $4 to about $30) on the replacement item.
Their service is good, their responce to missing items is excelent. Overall, unless there's a large difference in price, amazon.com are known good and trusted, by me.
...when's Slashdot going to be profitable?
;-)
--jeddz
What do I think? I dunno.. but it's great being the first poster..
Sun is doing quite well, and it's nice to know more companies are coming out from hiding showing their Anti-M$ feelings.
-----
Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Looks to me like it takes using Microsoft products. The ease of use and administration is important with a small start-up company. Not to mention the cheaper hardware Microsoft products run on.
Has anyone ever heard of an ISP that doesnt include any services other than dial up. Most especially lacking tech support. My thought is that without the expense of admining multiple servers and paying tech support people service could be provided to the geek niche for a relatively low monthly rate. Add the option of colocating and it would be my ISP of choice. What do you think?
Try being a bit more subtle.
I'm sure profitability makes the business-owners and investors out there happy, but I can't say I care too much about it. No self-respecting hacker is going to seriously worry about turning a profit, right? And it's not my goal in life to be part of something along those lines, either. But making a living and keeping the ball rolling is of interest to everyone, I imagine.
;-P
How does one go about taking a neat idea, an impulse, an epiphany and turning it into a project or company that can sustain itself, though? There ought to be a HOWTO out there on that!
How to be an entrepeneur and not obsess about making big bucks...the two seem to go hand in hand these days. Bah!
And yeah, I'm obivously too incoherent to be a successful (read: profitable) businessman
i am gonna build the best think tank for developing internet IP and selling it by 1) get a huge cool old building /wharehouse 2) renovate it into luxury apartments + workspace 3) cutting edge info tech through out the building 4) hundreads of servants 5) lots of hores who give good head daily 6) library of hot sports cars for employees given this environment hire the best and the brightest and give all these mega perks, get a kickass project manager. then get major venture capital and agreements with industry leaders. ill be rolling in bux in no time, wanna join me?
it's not "hores", it's "whores", with a "w". rolling in bux my ass, you can't even spell "whores".
Is it just me, or has the quality of the posted comments really gone down hill lately? I realize that I'm contributing to the problem by posting off topic, but the preschool-ish posts that have been appearing lately are beginning to severely irritate me. Does this bug anyone else, or am I just being overly sensitive?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yep, it's been downhill since the scoring system came on-line.
I think that the reply to the crap is probably just as bad, and I'm definitely guilty, but I guess I was just trying to figure out so what the heck :-)
As for the moderator points, they are already generated on a ratio to the number of comments, but the system is definitely starting to sag. I also try to accentuate the positive when I'm moderating, but today I just flat ran out of points, and there was definitely still some good stuff that needed +1's and some crap that needed -1's.
In checking back now, that's still the case, but I'm still out of points. Ah well, its just a website, so I'm not stressing over it, but it seems to be a bummer at the moment - that's for sure.
In the midst of this anti-hype, it's still important to keep in mind that short term profits aren't everything: Amazon.com, which has never turned a profit, is worth much more than a mom and pop store making a modest profit.
A company's long term outlook is more important than short term profits -- but speculation and betting just move the expected gains of the future to the present.
Organic seems to be doing OK.
The Bay Area attracts smart people. I know many folks who turn down bigger pay in cheaper places, because those places are fooking *boring*. Interesting, stimulating places are brain magnets, high rents or no.
If you have a good idea and need smart people to make it happen, you would be hard pressed to beat SF or Boston.
The bias is bad enough, but there's another reason why the current moderation will always be flawed: immediately giving inflated scores based on a user's recent history, but with a moving window used for averaging their scores. I've seen so many mediocre posts given scores of 2 lately that it's not even funny. (And no, I'm not talking about pro-Linux rah-rah crap getting moderated up, which is lame itself -- I'm just talking about your average run-of-the-mill posts that don't really have much to say)
Once someone reaches the plateau that is necessary for them to receive an immediate 2 on any post, it's a pretty sure bet that they'll never drop back down again, which (1) gives a false importance to everything they say, and (2) helps insure that their average will remain high. So, you end up seeing all these mediocre (and quite a few with outright factual misinformation)posts with scores of 2, since unless they're being inflammatory or stepping on the wrong advocacy toes, nobody's going to bother to waste their moderation points knocking down a so-so post.
Oh well, just thought I'd mention it. I don't really mind this post getting knocked down for being off-topic, since as someone who doesn't fawn over Linux, I don't have any plans to reach the 2-point posting plateau -- it would just be nice for when I'm trying to read other people's posts and would actually like to make use of the filtering here.
Oh yeah, and so that this isn't taken as mere rabblerousing, here's the solution: Reset every user's score back to +1 once a week or so -- people who say something interesting will still get other posts marked up for a short period of time, but we'd get rid of a lot of the deadwood who are just bumped up because they happened to say three interesting things in a row back in 1998, but who aren't really pulling their weight anymore.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Sounds like good advice to me. The main thing I would add is to watch your competition - even those who aren't directly competing with you now. Internet based organizations generally have a tough time building anything like barriers to entry for potential competitors. "Branding" is the primary strategy most web entrepreneurs rely on and branding is a high risk approach at the start.
It may be B-school - but there's some worthwhile things even techies can draw from there.
"I believe the children are our future: nasty, brutish and short."
Yep, it's been downhill since the scoring system came on-line.
I have to disagree. I was about ready to give up until Rob put that system in. I've set my threshold to 2 and never see any of the "first post!" or "NT rulz" crap. The only reason I even saw it today was because I read a post talking about it that had been moderated up. I bumped down the threshold to see what all of the commotion was about. Well, back up to 2, I guess.
Please moderate responsibly. Just because the post had the word "porn" in it doesn't mean it's offtopic or a troll. Anyway, I saw a TV news segment about one of those companies having an IPO--have any done well? Talk about low operating costs, high ROI. However, I shudder to think about what NASDAQ stock symbols porn companies might try to grab :)
In the midst of this anti-hype, it's still important to keep in mind that short term profits aren't everything:
Amazon.com, which has never turned a profit, is worth much more than a mom and pop store making a
modest profit.
Yes, but the stock price of Amazon.com has already realized that potential.
If you buy Amazon.com right now, for a long term investment, you are betting that Amazon.com will be able to succesfully run Borders and Barnes & Nobles out of business.
They need to, in order to justify their market capitalization at the moment.
So yes, you are buying on potential... but in this case, it has already gone well beyond what would be even remotely sane growth estimates
I can give the numbers to back this, if anyone wants to dispute me.
(imho)
The real problem is that internet startups lack a product or good content worth selling. It seems that a lot of new internet startups rely on one of two things: banner ads, or internet sales. It seems to me that there are an aweful lot of sites trying to be an all-in-one solution. We have ebay for auctions, but now Amazon and Barnesandnoble want a piece of that pie too. I'm ranting off topic. My point is this:
For a business to make money on the internet, they have to have a unique idea, good content or product, and a well designed web site.
-Z
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
I've ordered books from Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and Buy.com. Both Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com had great customer service. I will never buy anything from Buy.com again. I won't go into my sob tale, but they "lost" my order, shipped me the wrong (and damaged) books, and then my books didn't arrive for 30 days. Their customer service people said they couldn't help, then told me order status info that conflicted with what their website's order status told me. Many times their customer service reps were so busy, I was transfered to a voice mail. Unfortunately, the voice mail box was full and refused to take my name+number. be-otches..
I now buy books and music exclusively from Barnesandnoble.com. I would use Amazon except I live in WA state, so I would have to pay sales tax. Also, Amazon just started selling short films online, competing with the startup company my girlfriend works for (AtomFilms.com).
cpeterso
agreed they have differnt businesses but yahoo's gonna be around, bet your botton dollar
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
What a bone-head! You've listed 6 ways that you're planning to spend this fantasy revenue of yours, but 0 ways to start "the most profitable internet company". How do you propose to "get" any of this b4 you "then get major venture capital"??? Why don't you go back to sitting in front of your "blue screen of death", find yourself a feel-good hole and keep fantasising about it?
Oh, you already are.
From what I have noticed, the sites that seem to be the best and last the longest tend to be those that foster a community around one central subject - /. is news...for nerds, MP3.COM specializes in music for the MP3 masses, Amazon for books, Ebay for crap (ok, not all crap - I have bought a lot of good stuff through it).
/.), or it might be external to the site - but the really succesful ones have some way to chat/compare/argue oppinions with others built in. If /. just contained news, but didn't allow posting or moderation, do you think it would be as good as it is now?
The point is, sites like these create a following - mainly by the interaction. They site may have the interaction built in (like
How to make money on such a site is the next step - you could probably get advertisers - just don't overburden the user of the site with banners. Slashdot has it perfect, a single banner at the top, nothing more (not too much of a problem except when it is slow loading). I sometimes even click on the banner if it is interesting enough (and the banners should be targeted to the users of the site). An alternative to make money is to actually sell something on the site - software, bumper stickers, t-shirts. Another way is to sell the site - ie, have a "free" side (AC posting only) but pay for the privilage of a login (this may or may not work for some sites).
I am sure there are other ways - but the point is that the most popular sites are those that foster community.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
How so? Do moderators incite AC's to post bad comments by their blatant (pro-Linux, for example) biases?
I guess I could see that.
Malda adopted the most successful Internet business model of all, time-tested and proven to generate easy money. He sold out.
;-)
Even if you find it distasteful, there is no arguing with the numbers - online porn is a huge business with incredible growth potential.
Pick the right pony now and you could be a wealthy person in thirty years (if you can stomach the wait).
Moderatiors, to put an end to moderation dump all of your points on to my post. If you put enough it will get into the hof. Then Rob will read it, and he will see what a backlash there is against an un-fair moderation system.
REJOICE, THE END OF MODERATION IS NEAR!!!
Everybody knows that the only Internet company worth investing in is www.padlockcover.com! They're poised to make millions!
- Don't HQ in San Francisco - rent is expensive and everybody who's qualified to work for you is already hired. Go to Nebraska, where there's nothing to do so there's lots of people who know about computers but work as farmers cuz theres no tech companies there.
- Don't use Oracle - the "certified" Oracle people are more than twice as expensive than the MS SQL people, and always know less - not cuz they aren't as smart as the MS SQL people, but simply becauase MS SQL is easier to learn and use. Plus Oracle is more than 10x more expensive than MS SQL Server - more than 50x for a datawarehouse setup.
- Don't use Unix (any flavor) Use NT. I don't meaan to sound like a Microsoft-lover, but NT people are much cheaper and more knowlegeable than Unix people. I mean think about how easy one could screw up a good Unix setup vs screwing up a good NT setup. Editing
.config and .rc files vs clicking checkboxes. - Don't support Linux (yet). What everybody touting Redhat forgot to tell you is that nobody is making profit off Linux yet. Except Redhat, which sells a free OS for $80 and people are buying it because it's the latest fad. (Remember when everybody thought Java was going to take over Windows? Now Windows is the #1 dev platform for Java, the #1 platform Java programs are used on, and more people use Visual J++ than all other IDE's combined (of course Notepad and VI are still very popular).)
- Stop hiring college droppouts - all they do is read slashdot and blame Microsoft for everything wrong with their PC (man, Netscape crashed AGAIN! It's that damn Dr. Watson, I swear!).
- Stop hiring people that think AOL is good - They are taking over the world, quiker and silenter than Microsoft could ever execute. Everything from Winamp to MovieFone to the IMDB is now AOL. Plus over 100 other companies we've never heard of and THEY don't want us to know about. Until one day when you wake up and realize everything you own is from AOL. Oh wait, this AOL thing is off topic...
- Real Player puts seven icons, links, and shortcuts on your computer when you install it. - Is this really necessary? This is how they prove that they are anti-Microsoft? WHY are they so antimicrosoft? The founding members are ex-Microsoft employees. They all own stock in MS. And MS is one of the biggest investors in Real. They are anti-Microsoft because it gets them good press. It's much cooler to root for the underdog.
- And finally... Don't HQ in San Francisco... The rent's to expensive and everybody that's qualified to work for you is already hired.
Thank you.If you actually want to make money, you can make more money buying things from flea markets and selling them on Ebay.
Assuming, of course, that you have some skill at creating web pages (which you do) and that you can pick out decent items.
Then again, considering that all your programs are free, $37 isn't too shabby.
Those are the people with -failed- internet startups. Not everyone is so stupid.
I don't think that any experienced business person would buy what you just stated, either - no matter how net-newbie they were. 90% of internet startups fail because the people who start them are not-so-great-techies with no business experience and not enough money to get things off the ground --- they don't fail because they can't make money, but because they can't get capital to even start making money.
A W S ----------- QABO : BALA
What is Amazon worth, REALLY? I mean, take away the overinflated stock, and what do you have? Some servers, some T-1 lines, and a warehouse full of books?
Somewhere I once read a story told by an economist, where he offered a reporter a million dollars for their left arm. The reporter, or course, refused. But then the economist said: "Ah, but you see, now you're a millionare! You have something that's worh a million dollars!"
The point here is this: Nothing is worth anything unless someone wants it. If no one want to BUY amazon stock at it's current price, and the price starts to fall (see: supply and demand chart), you're going to wind up with a company that's suddenly got to prove to it's share holders what it's REALLY worth. As in profit. And trust me, this whole market share/eyeball stuff is NOT going to last long when you've got an angry horde of stockholders outside your door wondering why their $100+ stock is sudenly worth about a share of Marvel Comics stock.
Windows people are more knowledgable? WTF? There is most definately something going on. Someone should start looking at the log files for the past little while and see where all these posts that are obviously targetted at suits are comming from. Most of them, even the ones that try to read like a snot nosed kid, seem to have a clear message, IMHO. I can see it now "ZDnet: Even the community thinks NT and MS is best, OpenSource nutbars divided". Here's a better one "Microsoft accused of planting advocacy messagaes... AGAIN!" Or perhaps I'm just paranoid.
Database + CGI scripts = Money
Yahoo, Alta Vista, eBay, google, etc. They're all just databases and CGI scripts.
Okay, maybe marketing too.
Whoever you are. Non ACs here only wish the best for "Malda" OAWS Rob or CmdrTaco; and the rest of the /. crew, and RedHat, and those to come: VA Linux, Caldera, Corel, ... Live long and prosper. It's good to see $$ coming down on righteous people. May RMS find 10's of millions of $$ raining upon his head.
1000 SlashDot sigs
Jason Priestley? Why don't they put his picture on the padlock cover?
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
People with internet start up companies seem to be under the delusion that NO MATTER how horrible their product may be, that since its on the internet, it will make money. Thats the general idea people have gotten through the media and such. Well, its very very WRONG. What it does take is the same thing as a business not on the internet: genius ideas (or at least profitable ones) or a product people want. There is no way around that.
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Remember when AOL first went online? The chaos and idiocy that ensued?
Perhaps that is what is happening here. I have a hard time believing this is a bunch of Microsoft shills, so I'm forced to hope the posting will simply get better in time.
Either that or /. will go the way of newsgroups, with abysmal signal to noise...That would make me sad, so I'll keep hoping.
The aforementioned rules could have been summarized in one great rule:
1. Install IIS, MS SQL Server and NT and hire
MCSE certified professionals that think MSN rules.
Otherwise, excellent points. /.
It's good to see comments like this on
Ok, here's a nice list of reasons NT basically sucks, coming from the viewpoint of someone who has to admin several NT servers:
1) Don't dare try to install NT with more than 3 logical drives. It will only let you use 1GB of the primary drive.
2) Don't ever start up NT with one of your external RAID arrays unattatched. It will basically list the drives as offline, and won't let you do shit about it until you recreate the RAID container. And for the RAID unwashed out there, that means you gotta wipe the drives.
3) Need a BDC due to network growth? Better buy another server, cause you can't make an NT server become a PDC or BDC after installing it as neither. It's either reinstall an existing server or buy a new one.
4) Want to change just about anything? Better schedule a server downtime, cause you're rebooting. And for those of you who say "at least you don't have to reboot after changing the IP address", ever noticed how fucking unstable NT networking gets after you change that there IP without a reboot?
5) Got a wierd problem? Chances are you're gonna be stuck there for a nice long time with many many reboots, almost definitely a reinstall of the software in question, and a strong possibility of reinstalling NT.
I'll take having to know my way around rc scripts over NT shit any day. At least it's really hard to fuck up a *nix box enough to require a reinstall, or at least a big dose of stupidity, in which case what the hell are you doing running a server?
NT means MORE admin time, MORE potential to royally fubar the server, MORE downtime. In the last 9 months, I have been activelty administrating a number of *nix machines and several NT machines. I've never had to stay at work late as a result of the *nix machines. The NT machines have given me many long nights of extreme pain. Especially that one where I was at work till 4 am. I wanted to drive to Redmond right then and slap every member of the NT development team.
"Microsoft. Where do you want to go today? Better be close, 'cause you're walking."
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."