The Greatest Defunct Websites and Dotcom Disasters 192
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."
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.
I miss Dejanews (Score:5, Interesting)
Coincidentally... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, the founder wrote a book.
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)
I miss... (Score:1, Interesting)
I have yet to find another web based chatting site which was as well laid out and provided the right balance of services.
ABC/Go network can DIAF.
What sites do you miss?
mp3.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget Pixelon (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
what about everything2? (Score:1, Interesting)
But before wikipedia, there was everything2. Everything2 could have been what wikipedia is now, but CmdrTaco's poor programming and database skills left it unscalable and slow as fuck (much like slashdot, but without Anover.net/VA Linux/SourceForge cash to throw hardware at the problem).
Historical search engines (Score:2, Interesting)
Altavista [altavista.com] seemed to get replaced by google, in rather short order. I can't recall a specific reason I stopped using it, unless it was related to the repeated sale/reorg of DEC -> Compaq -> HP. I remember the news spreading about altavista hacked in '97 and '01 (the pr0n).
Maybe I'll use that webcrawler [webcrawler.com] search thingy to look this stuff up. Maybe I should go back to work [endoftheinternet.com] instead.
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?
Re:Remember... (Score:3, Interesting)
Circadence (Score:2, Interesting)
Circadence started as a small online games developer (VR-1) with well under a hundred employee and in a very short time grew to just under 500 people, millions of dollars of deployed hardware at 20+ network backbone nodes, a 24 hour NOC, 4 full time customer service people (each making 40k+) all without having a single customer. During this growth, the only money making arm of the company (the games development section) was sold off for additional capital.
Circadence was going to revolutionize e-commerce by speeding up vender to backbone node communication through packet manipulation. (Thus all the deployed hardware). No more static image caching for them, they could deliver dynamic shopping pages to the customer as much as.... 5-10% faster.... Wait. (To give some credit, the speed improvements would have been better if the projected e-commerce boom started to congest the internet, unfortunately that also never happened)
The first layoff went from 400+ employees down to 130 or so and was couched in terms of a company wide meeting in both an upper and lower conference rooms. The lower conference room got the talk and were walked out the door en masse and then escorted back one by one to get personal possessions. The upper conference room was told to go home for the day and to come in tomorrow for business as usual.
A couple months later was the next round of layoffs, which took the company down to 11.
All those millions of dollars of network gear and servers showed up on trucks to be auctioned off at pennies on the dollar. An entire building worth of computers, office furniture, desk detritus, everything either went into dumpsters or boxes (which later went into dumpsters), or was also auctioned off.
Millions and millions of investor capital spent all for nothing. I wanted to cry as I watch everything being thrown out, boxed up and disassembled. The beautiful NOC where I watched the events of 9-11 for half a day in shock was cold, dark, and in pieces... as was the hopes and dreams of the rest of the company.
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:Like most, they misunderstand Webvan (Score:3, Interesting)
But they decided to go nation-wide and spend a fortune building more automated warehouses in Dallas/Fort Worth, Atlanta, GA and Washington DC before they ever began to recoup the start-up costs of their west coast operation. I suspect that was their fatal mistake. Their smaller competitors, like http://www.peapod.com/ [peapod.com] (a subsidiary of the Andronico's Market chain) are still in business and doing fine. I seem to recall that my wife was impressed by how much cheaper the products were priced on WebVan when compared to the brick and mortar supermarket chains like Lucky and Safeway (she actually pulled out grocery receipts to compare the prices of items we purchased regularly). For the convenience of their service, WebVan could have charged more for their products and still been successful, but they chose to undercut the big chains to develop a loyal customer base. We were loyal customers, and many of our friends were as well. That's why we mourn the loss of WebVan, because it really was a new, exciting and groundbreaking business model.
I seem to recall that lots of their infrastructure was sold off in the bankruptcy process, and Safeway re-painted most of their delivery vans and they are still in use today.
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.
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.