Did you come across with people on the Internet who were promising you the Holy Grail of making money, getting out the carefully guarded so called "Secret Formula", the "Cookie Cutter Method", "from Rags to Riches way", the "Superfast, guaranteed way to get on top of the search engines" and a lot more?
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Added by Kevin B on Tue, Nov 10, 2009, 04:15 PM
What went wrong?
After almost 9 years later and finally figuring out how e-commerce really works we can safely say that during the infancy of the new economy companies
Those companies who survived the dotcom bust lacked the previously mentioned negative properties. They were success driven, had a long term vision and wanted to do business honestly. Among them was Google that was just a startup around that time and consisted of two kids in the basement at Stanford University working on a school project that later turned out to be the predecessor of the sophisticated search algorithm that underpins today's Google's search technology.
In the infancy of e-commerce, logistics and handling it properly became a major headache that turned into a nightmare to most of the companies. It was not unusual that someone ordered presents for Christmas only to get them in March in the following year. Why did this happen? Many dotcoms did not have good order tracking software. In fact, many of them only had the good, old fashioned way: pen and paper. Imagine: a
multi-million dollar software company with pen and paper
order tracking.... Amazon's founder was one of the few people who recognized that he needed to do something different than the rest the guys. In its infancy, Amazon was selling nothing else, but books and they did their order tracking by hand. But as they grew, they realized really fast that they need to implement a way that ordinary people (their order handlers) with minimal computer knowledge need to be able to handle the orders from an easy to use web page through a network. So this recognition gave birth to the first generation of so-called on-line or web-based applications that became popular in the commercial world within a few years. Sure, there were web-based applications before: they were used by the military, banks, power plants and traffic controllers. These were clumsy, required expert users and the underlying systems were beyond an everyday startup company's pocket. So it was not until the mid 90s when the first widely used web based applications started to gain ground. And even then most of the time, only 'intelligent' on-line merchants used them. One of the first on-line merchants who let their customer use their web-based applications heavily was E-bay with its unique approach of brokering deals between people selling and buying on-line.
Venture capitalists pulled the plug
on the dotcom companies and the so called 'new economy' collapsed. Over 95% of these companies disappeared overnight. Many of their owners got lucky and cashed in before the bust and 'parachuted' into companies with a different approach to e-commerce and on-line selling. Instead of trying to make money on the Internet themselves they went out as 'consulting experts' and found small business owners and promised them that the professionally looking websites that their companies design would make those small business owners very rich in a very short period of time. Their methods actually worked initially and they were tremendous successes indeed, in the beginning. As you may imagine, shortly after the initial successes, almost everybody started doing web design. That was when web design kits started to become popular and even a kid in the basement was able to design a professionally looking website. The underlying software for these website was overwhelmingly Flash which gave highly graphically intensive, many times absolutely beautiful web pages that moved around, played music and looked really professional. There are companies that even today want to sell Flash websites. Flash does have its place as it is a useful tool for a well-established business to reaffirm brand awareness and brand recognition.
However, Flash had and still have a few setbacks:
Stay tuned. There will be more coming.
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