First I would like to say I enjoyed everyone's videos very much. Good times.
"Pets.com latest high-profile dot-com disaster" by Troy Wolverton
This article is about Pets.com, an internet pet food company, that had to close down during the "Great We Wipeout" or "Dot Bomb." Basically, like many other web based companies at this time, they spent more than they made. According the the Dot Bomb article in 1999 the company spent $21 million in advertising (the awesome sock puppet dog) and only earned $5.4 million. Doesn't quite even out. Eventually the company shut down and sold everything, the article didn't say to who but if you go to the website now, it is no surprise.
All of these articles talk about the same thing, web based companies shutting down or going bankrupt. Before and during the time these articles were written a lot of companies were starting online businesses thinking it would make them quick money. Unfortunately, a lot of the people didn't know how to run a business and most of them shut down. I'm sure a lot of those sites are now shown on the Museum of E-failure.
My first thought on this was, "Wow, I didn't know this happened." Maybe I was too young to care about news. To me the internet has always seemed like a great place for business. I hope I'm not the only one in the class to hear about this for the first time, although I'm sure I am. My next thought was, "Is this still happening?" I'm sure it isn't as bad as it was then or I would be hearing about it. But, what I wonder is if the numbers are still relitively high or if we have managed to fix the problem? Obviously, a lot of businesses, online and else where, will shut down due to lack of interest and business skills, but this seems like an outrageous amount of failed businesses to me.
I guess the internet isn't as great as I once imagined huh?
2 comments:
At what point did these people actually sit down and decide that it would be practical for everyone to buy their pet food on the internet, so much so that it was worth investing millions in? I was surprised when I saw that it was not reported that his collapse had anything to do with advertisement problems, since that was the main focus of the article I did my abstract on. Although this is a different type of dot com, its a store.
I guess I am just baffled. Why is it that the creators did not see this one coming before they even started. I never get around to getting my mail, and waiting for anything in the mail is always a pain, who's going sit around checking their mail waiting for a bag of Meow Mix to show up? It just seems like a huge investment in something that there has never been any real documented interest in. I would like to see what type of research and numbers these creators studied before actually making their huge investment.
The whole leap of faith is something that really cues me in here. I always wonder how many times people have succeeded, compared to the number of failures at least it has to be low in staggering proportions. With this article I couldn't really relate, I'm not much of an animal person, so I never would have helped endorse such an idea (had I ever been in such a position to do so and have it mean something). I'm really curious how ebay succeeded and where they didn't go wrong in their oversight of business activities.
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