Ten Dot Coms sitting on a wall, if one should accidentally fall...
• Sam North

Roadkill on the Superhighway - February .2001

The collapse of dot com companies is accelerating, there is a a back-up on death row. As I write this, Dreamticket.com the travel tour company admitted it had run out of money and laid off 20 staff. Virgintravelstore.com is another who has closed its London operation - they have admitted what should have been obvious months ago, 'On-line bookings are not as good as people hoped..’

As Hacks revealed last October, booking anything other than a straight forward flight is chaotic, inflexible, and what customers really want is to talk to a human being, someone who can prompt, suggest, has experience and expertise. These are the things missing from most software. I have yet to meet anyone who has successfully used Lastminute.com and for that very reason I’d say their chances of surviving this year are shaky at best. (Everyone loved the ‘unfounded’ rumor of Martha Lane Fox having so much trouble with her own site she bought a ticket at ‘Trailfinders’. (I can say that I actually did buy a Trailfinders ticket after trying to use her site.)

But so what? The bubble bursts and things go back to normal? I think not. Something else much more dramatic is happening. As the companies start to topple, a voice is being heard. A voice that has been missing for around 100 years. The worker. And ironically that voice is being heard on the very medium that is crashing all around him or her.

Dead sites on the web have already filled up the prime graveyards, we are digging up the hills overlooking the city now. The bodies are being transported by the truckload to landfills. To get a taste of what is happening, the best place to start is the aptly named www.fuckedcompany.com . It’s a place to blow the whistle on your company as the guy comes around with the pink slip. Sometimes it’s a race between the whilsteblower and the pink slip man because you want to get word out before you are locked out. Many dot-com staff and coders are so disillusioned they just sit around watching the venture capital money click down towards zero. They know their company has blown its wad on the TV ads and radio spots, done the billboard thing and discovered that a: no one can remember the name of your stupid company and there are a LOT of stupid names. and b: what they really want to is go shopping in a ‘real mall’, meet real people and drink real coffee.

Snow Crash? Neuromancer? Well no, certainly not at 56k , no thanks.

Take the names. Apparently Cahoot is a bank. Smile. Another bank. Didn’t anyone think of using the word bank in any of these names so a search engine or a human being could find them? Razorfish? Oh yes, naturally you knew that they ‘provide strategic, creative, and technology solutions to some of the world’s most successful digital businesses’....

On the 2.02.2001 someone inside Razorfish got this out on www.fuckedcompany.com
‘hi. At 1.00 p.m. today, approximately 35% of Razorfishes' 1800 person staff will be laid off. If you work there, I think you have about 2 hours to burn those CD’s and steal shit... (rumor has it)
The postee immediately got advice from those watching the Super Happy Fun Slander Contest.
‘thing- you should really spend those 2 hours scouting security and finding a back door you can leave open. Secondly, get a black ski mask and go back later tonight, steal all the laptops you can - cos you’re gonna be broke as soon as you last paycheck runs out’.



It is excellent to get such good advice. At last we see the beginnings of a workers' democracy. Actually around 500 got the can at Razorfish and two weeks severance, but that is almost a third of the workforce and anyone will tell you that once you start firing that many, can Armageddon be far behind?

On 11.09.2000 this was posted on Fuckedcompany:
Communities.com: Lays off almost half. Rumor has it employees were called into ‘secret’, mandatory meetings.’ Those invited to the 11:00 a.m. meeting were told they still had a job. Those invited to the 11.45 meeting were told to go away.’
Response: same thing happened recently at Gaylord Digital. They had meetings, cleverly disguised to look like ‘cross functional teams,’ but were really for people being laid off. And then the poor fools were ‘escorted’ out of the building...duh!’

The great empowering thing about the net is this, you can tell people, right there in the Super Happy Fun Slander Corner the truth about modern employment practices and dot com HR culture. OK you get vented spleen, but most often this stuff is true.

On the 26th of January this year iBooks.com laid off 77 people out of a 100. There appeared an excellent posting on FuckedCompany’s site some of which read as thus: ‘...My friend, you are a true genius. In the madness of a totally mad age gone mad over its madness, your vulgarity and utter insanity represent the only true voice of reason and reality through subversive art.
And this was one of the many replies.
.. ibooks.com has been totally fucked by the visionless senior management brought in who demotivated ‘scared or forced’ out the core talent quicker than you can say ‘minority shareholder’. The ibooks.com story would be a great textbook case in tech business ‘don’ts’ for a business student.
And a last posting as recriminations mounted.
And before you start flaming me, maybe you should just return to www.startrek.com. You could have another date with that ‘cute Borg chick’. You’ll relieve some pent up hostility and besides, you can’t post messages with just one hand on the keyboard, right, ensign?
53 comments flowed from ibooks.com lay offs. This is industrial democracy in action.

In the old days unions would get the mobs out, but the worker never really had a voice. Now they have a say, disembodied, of course, but a voice nevertheless. You can flame your own company before they torch you. You can feel better about revenge and this is not a small isolated island. The list of dot coms in trouble is massive and growing daily as March 20001 approaches. Last March, at the peak of the bubble, billions were raised from venture capitalists. It is now running out, completely. If you can find any site that is actually making money, then award yourself a bonus.

This last week the list of new casualties and shaky foundations all posted on fuckedcompany included Rare Medium, IUMA.com, (Internet Underground Music Archive), Vicinity.com, even Yahoo is rumoured to be laying off 15 percent of its workforce. eHow.com too will soon crash and burn, even Motley Fool could be in trouble. Utility.com may let go half, Museumcompany.com is in trouble too, rumors also about Siebel Systems, Hotlinks.com , and the best posting is about Beyondwork.com ‘Rumor has it that employees will be finding out what is ‘beyond work’ in the next few weeks.

It doesn’t matter if you have never heard of these sites, it is simply that watching dot coms die has become the new gladiatorial sport. Every day we clock in to watch someone get it and right now the media is holding their thumbs firmly down. We all got heartily sick of all those people who made a fortune peddling shares in the new economic paradigm, selling ideas that the world would flock to. Now schadenfreude is here and unlike film stars who die in threes, dot coms are dying in droves.

FuckedCompany is a perfect foil for this. We all bought into the hype, we still have the computers, we are still on-line, only we didn’t buy anything, aren’t going to buy anything and basically what we want to do is send emails. What kind of emails? Well emails about dying companies for one thing. FuckedCompany even awards points for getting your predictions of a death foretold right. It doesn’t reward the obvious. It gives you more points for finding the obscure deathstars on the web. You can pick five companies a week, it is a kind of reverse lottery. Of course you can’t just post a rumor and hope that it sticks. The rumors are checked out by the sister site Dotcomfailures.- who kind of monitor the web in a more academic way (Though truth to tell - I couldn’t log on to see if they were still there, could it be? No, surely not?)

Should you feel like predicting Hackwriters.com is going to lay off staff, they’d have to call our HR person to find out if there is any truth out there. (For the record our staff are all locked in a chilly Cornish basement, fed bread and water and only allowed out on a leash once a day for ‘inspiration’. They receive no pay or share options and so far we have had no complaints - well alright they aren’t actually allowed to complain.)

So is there anything positive to report on the net. Is there nowhere to go that is still administering the kiss of life to these dying ducks? I checked out redherring.com (supported by their print magazine that has gotten so fat with ads you just know they are going to be here for the long haul.)
On 09.02.2001 they begin a piece:
In the last 60 days close to 40 dot-com businesses have shut their doors and last time we checked 211 Internet companies were trading 80 percent off their 52 week highs.
It is not an encouraging start.

Well the gist of what they are predicting is that B2B (business to business) is the big thing - the retail consumer was the wrong model. Everyone is hoping for synergies and savings from inter-company dealings and purchases. Car spares for instance, Andy Grove, the Intel godfather predicts that by 2003 100 percent of businesses will have a web presence worth some $3 to $6 trillion dollars a year.

The real story is mobile commerce. (Of course anyone who has received an annoying txt message trying to sell you a phone upgrade or a new car may not think so) However voice, data and video are all moving into a single IP network and will be available on your phone. So what they are saying is we will be shopping, talking, banking, watching using our phones and all those computers we bought will be pretty much redundant. But what if they are as wrong about this as they were about the web? And is it all down to bandwidth? Wap phones were a bust. The new broadband web on your phone will attract the kids, no doubt about it, but what about us, the ones losing our sight and hair and waistlines. i.e: anyone over 30. I don’t really want to change my phone every year, just about the time I can finally figure out how to use it.

So back to the web, maybe it is time to think about what we want. A site that asks you what you want to do today? That would be nice. A banking site that automatically checks to see if you are getting the best interest rates for your money and then shifts it there, that would be great. A web site that lets you know - discretely that the woman or male of your dreams has moved into your neighbourhood and is thinking of breaking up with their partner if they could find someone to move on to. A site that knows your taste so well it books movie tickets for you and the best table in your favorite bistro,and negotiates a discount on your behalf. A site that reviews your CV and compares it to jobs on offer in all the agencies and employment ads, then discretely sets you up with an interview. A site that calls your mother twice a day to check on her USING your own voice, so she doesn’t know you forgot these last six months and it remembers her birthday wrongly by five years...

Why isn’t anyone developing these web sites? The web wouldn’t be dying if these sites were out there and there’s the rub. A lot of people say, just wait, it is in its infancy, it will grow up. But I suspect it is dying in more ways than one. The shards of all that remains will be owned by the corporate giants who will spoon feed us the old crap, the shiny new old crap that never leaves a customer satisfied.

I leave with this message posted up on www.fuckedcompany.com/jobs/
This board is being used by terrorists to plan missions in the US
_______________________________________
terror.com is coming to a mobile phone near you.
© Sam North 2001

I hope you enjoy this months packed Hackwriters - and if you do, tell a friend - we need all the friends we can get

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