Slashdot Log In
The Greatest Defunct Websites and Dotcom Disasters
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jun 05, 2008 10:33 AM
from the i-remember-everything dept.
from the i-remember-everything dept.
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."
Related Stories
[+]
The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir 156 comments
Larry Sanger was one of the moving forces behind the pioneering Nupedia project. That makes him one of the people to thank for Wikipedia, which has been enjoying more and more visibility of late. Sanger has prepared a lengthy, informative account of the early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia, including some cogent observations on project management, online legitimacy, dealing with trolls, and other hazards of running a large, collaborative project over the Internet. As Sanger writes, "A virtually identical version of this memoir is due to appear this summer in Open Sources 2.0, published by O'Reilly and edited by Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper, and Mark Stone. The volume is to be a successor to Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (1999)." Read on below for the story (continued tomorrow). Update: 04/20 19:19 GMT by T : Here's a link to the continuation of Sanger's memoir.
Submission: The greatest defunct Websites and dotcom disasters by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Thank God (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank God (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Thank God (Score:4, Interesting)
Read dot.bomb by David Kuo - a very interesting insider look into what all went wrong in a typical dot.com company.
Parent
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Thank God (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
But it IS the recipe for getting a bogus patent, which in turn leads to tons of cash - for lawyers, anyway.
Parent
Re:Thank God (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
beopen (Score:5, Funny)
When it ran out of money a guy I know came back with T-Shirts. Not the cheap ones you get at trade shows but solid fruit of the loom stuff that lasted me 7 years of constant use (I throw shirts out when they get their first hole) as it turns out that was longer than the company lasted in the first place.
i'm confused (Score:5, Funny)
somewhere, a cliche has just died...
Parent
Re:beopen (Score:4, Informative)
you want to start a business and even have some start up money to get going that's great. but you had better carefully plan out the next two years of bills that you know about. as if you start coming up short your screwed.
Parent
Re:beopen (Score:5, Insightful)
GP was in part referring to the fact that businesses often expect revenues and profits to come much more quickly than they actually do and have not planned ahead for the initial stages of a start-up. For traditional small businesses, lack of sufficient capital is the main cause of failure for new businesses. I suspect that remains the case with web businesses, even if it sometimes could be more accurately described as over-valuing the worth of your product.
The factors you mention are factors in the failure of a business, and it was a nice touch that you mock someone for talking about planning 5 years ahead and then list poor planning as your first idea of why most businesses fail. Five years may seem like a lifetime to you and the world of tech, but a solid business plan will almost always hold up over that long of a period without a huge amount change. (If you need to make huge changes to your business plan every year, you're probably in your death throes - even for tech companies.) Moreover, a business shouldn't expect profits for at least the first two years of its existence. Five years is a pretty short deadline to expect to get out of start-up mode.
Of course, you can opt to say "It's the web" and then accelerate all of your deadlines by a factor of four. That worked well last time, and I'm sure it'll work well with Web 2.0.
Parent
One Good Thing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One Good Thing (Score:4, Funny)
No they weren't. Ever try to muffle a fart in an Aeron chair?
Parent
Pets.com (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Interesting)
...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?
Parent
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Informative)
It was the 2001 eTrade SuperBowl commercial [youtube.com].
...hmm. Maybe I didn't remember it so well, after all.
Parent
Re:Pets.com (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
I miss Dejanews (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> was Usenet that contained the useful technical
> information we needed, and when Dejanews was
> the best way to get to it.
Noob. Getting a feed from someone was the best way, and second best was getting a login on a small machine that had the feed. Dejanews was the Harbinger of Death for Usenet.
Re:I miss Dejanews (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Coincidentally... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, the founder wrote a book.
AllTheWeb.com (Score:5, Informative)
FAST could have been Google, it was better, but the upper management decided there was no real money to be made in web search.
Alas, no matter how smart the engineers, or how good the technology, stupid management can screw up a free lunch. Unfortunately, win or lose, they *ALWAYS* get the pay off.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the while google's search results were/are good, the key thing they twigged to earlier than most was how HUGE web advertising was, and how to monetise it. That could have happened in Norway with alltheweb, but it didn't.
When google filed IPO documents people finally understood how HUGE web advertising was.
--Q
Re:AllTheWeb.com (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, but tell that to the investors. The free market said that Google's original business model wasn't good enough - the tech wasn't good enough apparently.
Unless you have the money and you don't care about any sort of return, when you go into business, you must make a return on investment. And when you have investors, if you squander their money, they
ClubCastLive (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:CNet (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Distasters! (Score:4, Funny)
mp3.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget Pixelon (Score:4, Interesting)
All of those collapse and goatse.cx still lives on (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All of those collapse and goatse.cx still lives (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, now seriously, it was just an arse. Admittedly a rather stretched one, but I gather there must be _some_ demand for seeing that on a woman, judging by the whole category of porn and whole sites dedicated to it. I haven't heard of people reeling in shock after being exposed to almost seeing a <insert female pornstar>'s kidneys up her rear end after an anal scene. Or sometimes in the middle of it.
Seriously, it wasn't the most appealing or aesthetically pleasing picture out there, I'll grant that, but I just can't figure out the _horror_ some people claim to have experienced seeing it. It seems a rather disproportionate response. You'd figure that a simple, "hmm, how's this relevant to the topic at hand?" and hitting the back button would be enough for all practical purposes. Horror or shock? Erm, why?
Or was it just the implicit hint of homosexuality that gives the average male in some parts of the world the idea that he must seem properly outraged and horrified by it, lest someone might get the idea that he's gay too? Not trolling, just genuinely trying to figure it out.
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
Could it be, that maybe YOU are the goaste man and are miffed at the negative response you've gotten from your skillfull anal theatrics?
Parent
Jenni Archives (Score:3, Insightful)
Jenni-cam? (Score:3, Interesting)
APBNews.com (Score:3, Interesting)
That and our own nofuncharlie [archive.org], which went under not because of lack of funding (there never was any in the first place), but because we let some domain-snatchers grab the domain out from under us....
What about Wireplay? (Score:3, Interesting)
When that first started it was, in my opinion, the best online gaming service available. For those who don't know you paid for a connection direct to their servers, not the internet, which made it the fastest gaming experience available in the pre broadband era.
There were gaming leagues, prizes, admins/judges for all games,and the chatroom system was excellent. I don't think their chatroom system has ever been bettered in fact.
All my best gaming memories come from my time as a Wireplay member. I even made skins for lots of clans who played in the leagues.
There was sort of informal feel to the place too, The staff had a webcam in their office that let you watch them work, and they had a log that they wrote whatever came to mind in, who was off sick, what they'd got up to at the weekend, anything.
I don't recall who bought them out, but sometime during the boom they got taken over, and everything turned to shit, somost of the people I knew quit and moved over to barrysworld leagues. I left shortly after the new owner assraped the chatroom system and wrecked its charm.
Now I find that it exists as some sort of free affair, but it's not the same.
Re:What about Wireplay? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Kozmo.com (Score:4, Informative)
I kind of knew at the time that they'd never turn a profit, but it was nice while it lasted.
Like most, they misunderstand Webvan (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Please .... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Please .... (Score:5, Informative)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2099 [mozilla.org]
Parent