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."

Thank God

Thank God we live in the enlightened days of Web 2.0, in a bubble that will never burst!

Re:Thank God

There will still be booms and busts, of course, but I do think people are a little wiser these days about how to make money on the web. (And no, I'm not talking about porn; anyone who, um, pokes around a little can find enough free porn to satisfy any appetite.) No amount of collective knowledge can save the truly stupid from themselves, but most folks do seem to realize that "... on the INTERNET!" is not in and of itself a recipe for making tons of cash. The truly successful dot-coms such as Google and Amazon and Ebay provide an example for internet business models that actually do make money, and smart would-be web entrepeneurs will study these few successes and (as well as the many, many failures) carefully.

Re:Thank God

"but most folks do seem to realize that "... on the INTERNET!" is not in and of itself a recipe for making tons of cash. "

But it IS the recipe for getting a bogus patent, which in turn leads to tons of cash - for lawyers, anyway.

Re:Thank God

Web 2.0 isn't a tool to make it better. It's just the obvious direction it was going. Anyone who was actually surprised by it, or thinks it's a 'new thing' is the tool.

Re:Thank God

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.

beopen

Beopen.com .. Hired a full staff of reporters with the dream of competing with slashdot.

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

so the company went belly up, but no one lost the shirts off their backs

somewhere, a cliche has just died...

Re:beopen

Wow, impressive way to misinterpret him, mock the strawman, and then give your own inaccurate assessment.

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.

Pets.com

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

that is the same sock puppet

Re:Pets.com

Yeah, I just found the info on wikipedia. Slashdot would not let me reply to my own post for whatever reason. Apparently, I do not deserve a second chance. :)

Re:Pets.com

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

Never mind, I found it!

It was the 2001 eTrade SuperBowl commercial [youtube.com].

...hmm. Maybe I didn't remember it so well, after all.

I miss Dejanews

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.

Re:I miss Dejanews

I pine for the days when I used a mail reader called pine...

AllTheWeb.com

bit for bit the best and most relevant search of the time. We went head to head with Google and we *HAD* better results with fewer duplicates.

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:AllTheWeb.com

For me, the greatest appeal of google was the lack of ad images (and it still is). Most of the web world still hasn't quite learned this lesson: don't annoy people.

CNet

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

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.

All of those collapse and goatse.cx still lives on

How, for the love of God, how....

Re:All of those collapse and goatse.cx still lives

I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes screaming "I think I can see his kidneys, my eyes, my eyes!"

I don't get it

You know, I don't quite get it. I've seen bigger arseholes in upper management or on the cover of some management magazines, and noone gets a shock at seeing those ;)

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.

Like most, they misunderstand Webvan

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:Please ....

One look & I decided to NRTFA and save time by reading /.comments.

Re:Please ....

Firefox Repagination Add-On works pretty well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2099 [mozilla.org]