Could never figure out how anyone could make money selling groceries on the net? Books yes, but even Omaha Steaks has a problem. Saba Welcome, saba22�� Sign Up for Newsletters� | �Log Out �� Go to Advanced Search � July 15, 2001 Virtual Revenge and the Decline of the Dot-Coms By AMY HARMON The hooting and jeering began the moment Webvan, the online grocer that was once a Wall Street darling, shut its doors last week, laying off its 2,000 employees and saying it would seek bankruptcy protection. First, there was the predictable crowing from terrestrial competitors who had been threatened by Webvan, which had symbolized the power of the Internet to transform even the most mundane industries. "The supermarket landscape is littered with the skeletons of online grocers that tried to create a viable business model and failed," one news report quoted a spokesman for the grocery store chain Kroger as saying last week. "But our C.E.O. has said all along that we are not going to invest a large sum of money in a business that isn't profitable." Then came the haiku. Contributors to a Web site whose name refers to doomed dot-coms with an adjective that cannot be printed here, submitted approximately 400 poems, most along the lines of: One hundred million Could not keep us in business. Jeez do we look dumb. Actually, Webvan burned through something like $1.2 billion, which helps explain a certain enthusiasm for kicking the Internet bubble generation while they and their share prices are down. There are plenty of forums eager to catalog the fate of the folks who seduced investors and employees with visions of sure riches, including the dot-com graveyard, (www.upside.com /texis/mvm/graveyard/index), the dot-com deathwatch list (www.hoovers.com) and the flop tracker, which pegs the total dot-com flops at 245 (www.thestandard.com/trackers/flop/). In any case, it's high season for schadenfreude. On Internet message boards, in media reports, at cocktail parties, almost anyone with a steady job in the old economy seems to be partaking of a new cultural pastime: gloating over the latest dot-com demise. "You can tell when you read between the lines that people are happy you are forced to go back to work," said Fred Levenson, who recently returned to the Palo Alto law firm that he had left for a job at Alta Vista, an Internet search engine company. "People are very happy that a lot of young people did not make a fortune in a very short period of time." The endless Internet ideas once categorized under the acronyms B2C (business to consumer) and B2B (business to business) are now being retrofitted with new definitions that satirize the entrepreneurs who hawked them. B2B now means "back to banking," B2C has morphed into "back to consulting," and, for the most ignominious failures, B2M means "back to Mom's." EVEN The Onion, a humor publication that gained national attention through its Internet site, recently ran an article suggesting that laid- off dot-com workers receive unemployment benefits in the form of stock options in their former start-ups, accompanied by a photograph of an unemployment line of people sporting fancy messenger bags, Palm Pilots and cell phones. Carol Kolb, The Onion's managing editor, suggests that the former Internet evangelists, notorious for their lavish parties and Aeron chairs, deserve such treatment for the excesses they committed during their glory days. "I guess it seems O.K. to be mean to them because they themselves were all too ready to jump on the bandwagon and get excited about this golden future that was going to skyrocket them to fame and fortune," she said. Andrew Giangola, a spokesman for McKinsey & Co., a major consulting firm, simply notes that the shift in interest among top business school graduates away from start-ups over the last year speaks for itself. "I don't want to sound arrogant here but a lot of students are now realizing a career at a top consulting firm can offer interesting work in a progressive yet stable environment," he said. "Accent on the stable." But if the hubris and high living of the would-be Internet conquerors has been widely derided, the smug satisfaction of those now enjoying their fall may suffer the same fate. Hypocrisy, after all, is not the most attractive of traits, and many of the lawyers, journalists and employees of "bricks and mortar" companies now sniggering over the latest "Ten Signs Your Dot-Com Is on the Skids" list making the rounds (via e-mail, naturally) were not long ago enviously watching the Internet gravy train pass them by. And the Internet economy, which is a real and enormous fact, not just a business-plan fantasy, may yet emerge to take its revenge. "It's like they're relieved because it validates the position that their prudent, conservative approach was the right course," said Josh Harris, the founder of Pseudo.com, a Web-based entertainment company that shut down last fall. "But the pooh-poohers never took the chance, they never knew what it was like when there was a charge in the air, and they probably never will." What most irks Tim Cavanaugh, the former editor of Suck, an online magazine that stopped publishing last month, is the sense that all that is good and successful about the Internet is being wrapped into the collective repudiation of it. Still, Mr. Cavanaugh admits that, but for his insistence on not mocking failing Internet companies, Suck might still be around. "There's definitely a huge market for it," he said. Mr. Levenson, the lawyer, said he doesn't mind the ribbing he takes from colleagues and clients, because he himself has had to learn to laugh at seeing his shares in Alta Vista's parent company, CMGI, shoot from $42 to over $300 in 1999, only to plummet by 90 percent in the summer of 2000. "But I was close," he said. "I could be sitting on a boat in Florida right now � gloating." Home | Back to Week In Review | Search | HelpBack to Top SABA NOTE: Key to success - get in first, and get out first - you got to know when to fold.....make big killing and get out leaving remains to the suckers - like leaving an area before it turns into a slum and boneyard for the ones stuck with the left overs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/weekinreview/15HARM.html?todaysheadlines
