Howard Kurtz gives Henry "Amazon at 400" Blodget the drubbing

March 12, 2001 1:30 AM

Howard Kurtz gives Henry "Amazon at 400" Blodget the drubbing he ought to have received 18 months ago. And as Kurtz explains, Blodget did receive it, in the legacy media (I think it's called the legacy media because they're what will be left standing when the few remaining dotcom content sites finally die). But no, the dead-tree writers were all wrong. They just didn't get it. Except they weren't. And they did. Those that sneered are now largely (and deservedly) gone. And all us print and TV people are left to ask: Why did any of you ever buy into this BS in the first place? We tried to warn you!
posted by aaron (17 comments total)

You ain't talkin' to me, bubba. I was here when there wasn't no commercial sites (not to mention before that - if you happen to have a copy of the uucp maps circa 1989 lying around you'll fine me in 'em. Crom2.rn.com, Athens GA. [note, the .com in my address just means that I was registered in the domain of my upstream connection, rn.com, not that I was selling insurance or beanie babies or pix of hot women.]) I've been praying for the entire commercialize-the-internet movement to hit the tar pits ever since I saw that first smarmy banner ad. OOOO AHHH what a pleasure to see the implosion arrive at last, in all its gory dripping majesty.

Fiat: people who try to make money off the web are obnoxious idiots, have always been obnoxious idiots, will always be obnoxious idiots until they all shut up and go away. The web is for hobbyists who put up content for free so other hobbyists will think they're cool. This is the SINGLE AND ONLY legitimate, moral use of httpd, html, xml, cgi and/or Perl.


posted by jfuller at 6:16 AM on March 12, 2001

A bit extreme, don't you think? I could do without the advertising and overcommercialization just like everyone else, but to say that all PERL script should be used for non-commercial purposes is pretty over-the-top. Does that mean that the airwaves should only be used for broadcasting non-commercial content or that land should only be used for building shelter?

I can't believe *I* sound like the capitalist...
posted by goto11 at 7:14 AM on March 12, 2001

> A bit extreme, don't you think?

Extreme? Me? Gee, all I'm rilly saying is marketing droids are frantically competing with pederasts for grottiest-carbon-based-lifeform. (And winning...)

posted by jfuller at 7:24 AM on March 12, 2001

All you anti-commercial internet guys are just as bad as the marketroids out there.
posted by owillis at 7:36 AM on March 12, 2001

This is the SINGLE AND ONLY legitimate, moral use of httpd, html, xml, cgi and/or Perl.

jfuller: Assuming this is meant seriously (and I didn't think for a minute it was until I saw others taking it that way), I have a question: why?
posted by mw at 8:29 AM on March 12, 2001

> Assuming this is meant seriously (and I didn't think for a
> minute it was until I saw others taking it that way)

Thanks, mw, it was indeed flamebait. Thank you very much for noticing.

The fact remains, though, that the sites of the folks who put up whatever they like, for free, (hardware info, sf or anime fandom, sociopolitical rants, blogs, how-to-write-shell-scripts, you name it) and support their habit by flipping burgers or doing brain surgery or whatever, instead of selling their souls to doubleclick.net -- these sites are the interesting, fun sites and they are NOT part of the current bloodbath. The smarmy ad-supported sites, all of which were apparently designed by interior decorators from Fort Wayne and it shows, these are the ones which are the noise that came close to overwhelming the signal not long ago and are now the ones getting flushed at an almost-adequate rate. jfuller gets warm fuzzy feeling about this. Amateurs rule, dotcoms drool.

(Corollary: if you do happen to be good at Perl but what you're writing is shopping cart apps, all you're going to get for your effort and talent is some amount of money. No respect, no matter how clever you are. Oh yeah, and writing web apps in ColdFusion over Oracle is on all fours with writing in RPG or Cobol.)

posted by jfuller at 9:24 AM on March 12, 2001

But jfuller, that "some amount of money" is what supports many of the hobbyists that are doing cool things. Why should I live at a burger flipper's salar to support my hobby when I can live at a shopping cart coder's salary and support my hobby comfortably?

Also, having people who do the hobby-thang you so admire entrenched in the dotcom drooling pool is a Good Thing for what you want the Internet to become.

Sure, it'd be possible to say "Oh, you're a clueless dot-com, you don't understand the Internet, so you suck" but why not get in on the inside? If the hobbyists can convince the dot-coms you're so happy to see die in flames that there's a clueful and a clueless way to do things on the 'net, and that the clueful way is in fact the better way to exist.

Rereading your post, I think I may be misinterpreting, lemme know if I am.

Can you point me to an example of what an interior decorator from Fort Wayne designs like? I hate it when I miss in-jokes.
posted by cCranium at 11:15 AM on March 12, 2001

Time.com's take on Yahoo.


posted by Nathan at 12:21 PM on March 12, 2001

> Sure, it'd be possible to say "Oh, you're a clueless
> dot-com, you don't understand the Internet, so you suck"
> but why not get in on the inside?

Um, is there an inside to be on these days? Last I heard the dotcom press they used to use for printing stock option certificates had been switched over to doing pink slips.


> If the hobbyists can convince the dot-coms you're so
> happy to see die in flames that there's a clueful and
> a clueless way to do things on the 'net, and that the
> clueful way is in fact the better way to exist.

There's a catch-22 here, namely that for internet-only dotcoms cluefulness is incompatible with existence. The number one clue that commercial internet outfits missed is that while there are all kinds of cool, interesting things to do on the www, there aren't any business plans that translate these things into reliable money. Online retailing doesn't work (ask eToys.) Selling banner ads doesn't work (ask everybody, even mighty Yahoo.) Charging fees for content doesn't work (watch Napster croak as soon as they have to pay royalties and charge user fees.)

Really, the only e-commerce business plan that worked was fleecing dumb venture capitalists and dumber IPO investors -- and that particular business plan was, ah, time-limited. There comes a day when all the con men have to split for Argentina because the game's over, and leave the customers and employees holding the (empty) bag. If any dotcom invited me into the "inside" tomorrow and asked for a clue, the only clue I would have to give 'em would be "cheese it, the jig is up." To quote from the Time article referenced in a previous message:

> Yahoo gets nearly all its cash from online advertising,
> and this worked very well in the breakneck economy of
> the past five years. With its 160 million visitors
> worldwide, everyone wanted a piece of Yahoo's eyeball
> universe. But in a downturn, advertising becomes more
> expendable. Web ads are no exception.
>
> What Koogle didn't see, or didn't admit to seeing, was
> mounting evidence that online ads just don't work as well
> as their offline counterparts. Few people are clicking on
> those flashy top-of-the-page banners--0.01% of viewers in
> recent studies, compared with 0.06% a couple of years ago.
> Heck, even junk mail gets a 1%-to-2% response rate.
>
> This banner-ad Alamo brings Yahoo's entire business model
> into question.


I know how to save Yahoo: dump all the ads; pink slips for everybody but Jerry Yang and David Filo; Jerry and Dave go back to school so they qualify for some student serverspace; Yahoo (a bit reduced in scale, heh) goes back onto a Stanford server. A WHOLE LOT of stockmarket players go home sadder budweiser.

posted by jfuller at 1:49 PM on March 12, 2001

I'd counter that by saying ecommerce does work, when done correctly. Amazon was well on its way to being profitable as an online bookstore when they decided to compete with Walmart, only they forgot about Walmart's $.

If Amazon had stayed with books Jeff Bezos wouldn't be sweating Nasdaq-filled bullets.

The net had a lot of small, smart businesses that got stupid and big fast.

It's time again for the small and smart to make some money.
posted by owillis at 3:54 PM on March 12, 2001

The arch-capitalist's viewpoint: Warren Buffett's take on the last year's hilarity. Search down for "Aesop", but here's an excerpt:

The fact is that a bubble market has allowed the creation of bubble companies, entities designed more with an eye to making money off investors rather than for them. Too often, an IPO, not profits, was the primary goal of a company's promoters. At bottom, the "business model" for these companies has been the old-fashioned chain letter, for which many fee-hungry investment bankers acted as eager postmen.

Not that we didn't already know it, but still.
posted by holgate at 6:03 PM on March 12, 2001

jfuller: I was going to argue that you're being too extreme. That even though most dotcoms are no good, you can't be right to say (as you seem to) that all dotcoms are utterly worthless. So for this argument to be convincing, of course, I needed to come up with a really good example.

So I spent a few minutes on that. And I failed. Completely. The best I could find, drawing from sites I actually visit, were a couple of hobbiest sites that used banners to help support their habit.

So, I'm with you: amateurs rule, dotcoms drool. Even if we did want to keep some of them around to extract money from (and I do want to, believe me, I do), it's no good, they're just inherently inferior, they can't make a profit, and they can't make a site worth visiting. Here's hoping the ISPs, at least, will be stable.
posted by moss at 12:30 AM on March 13, 2001

Um, is there an inside to be on these days? Last I heard the dotcom press they used to use for printing stock option certificates had been switched over to doing pink slips.

Yes, there still is. There's lots of small dot-coms that you haven't heard of that aren't trying to ship dog food around the world.

They aren't the same kind of dot-coms though, and most of them would passionately avoid being labelled dot-com, but it's still quite possible to do business online.

The commercial web doesn't include just ecommerce. Every web site that's just a corporate presence online is part of the commercial web, and there's a space for it.
posted by cCranium at 5:05 AM on March 13, 2001

> The commercial web doesn't include just ecommerce. Every
> web site that's just a corporate presence online is part
> of the commercial web, and there's a space for it.

Oh, I wouldn't deny that for a minute. I think "dotcom" has a special meaning, namely those companies that sprang up like mushrooms during the last handful of years to capitalize on the existence of the www and that wouldn't exist if there were no www. General Motors, AT&T, Newsweek and Microsoft are all engaged in e-commerce to one degree or another but they're not dotcoms just because they have web sites registered in the .com domain.


> Here's hoping the ISPs, at least, will be stable.

Oh, amen to that. My own little mom'n'pop ISP still gives me shell access and it's the only Irix system I have any experience of, even as a user. Please don't let them get bought out!

posted by jfuller at 6:41 AM on March 13, 2001

I think "dotcom" has a special meaning

Ah, okay. In that sense I suppose I can pretty much agree with the drooling dot-com scenario above. :-) I guess it's just a matter of definition, which is what I suspected when mentioned I thought I was misinterpreting.
posted by cCranium at 9:00 AM on March 13, 2001

If you leave Express open, you can configure it to autocheck your mail.

One thing I really really liked was Communicator's mail agent, that hid in your system tray and checked the server every x minutes without actually needing Netscape Mail open. That was a great li'l app. Outlook (full version) will detect new mail for you as long as it's open, but it has to be open, which is a pain in the ass. I wish more applications could be removed from the task bar when minimized.
posted by cCranium at 5:09 AM on March 14, 2001