A Flash-Back to the Good Ol’ Bubble Days
Sunday, December 31st, 2006I was cleaning out my bookshelf today, and found a Business 2.0 from April 2000 squeezed between some Print Magazines. The year 2000 was the at the height of the dot-com bubble, the same year where Super Bowl XXXIV featured seventeen dot-com companies that each paid over $2 million for a 30-second spot and CBS-backed iWon.com gave away $10 million to a lucky contestant in a 30-minute primetime special that aired on CBS. The magazine is nearly 5/8 inch thick and the majority of it advertisements, so I started flipping through it.
After trying a few of the URL’s for the advertisers, I discovered that nearly a third of the companies had been acquired, a third were either rebranded or no longer there, and a third were still doing business under the same premise as they had advertised (most of these non-tech companies). All this in the last 6 years.
Here were the first 10 ad spreads (2 page ads) to give you an example of what I mean:
- Banana Republic (Inside Front Cover Pull-out) “Work”
Still around - Lexus (Page 2-3) “The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection”
Still around - File Maker Pro (Page 3-4) “What’s your problem?”
Still around (3.5 versions later) - Wit SoundView (Page 46-47) “Vision for the Digital Economy”
Dead page - 404 - Digitial DNA from Motorola (Page 48-49) “The Heart of Smart”
Referred to Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. - Louis Boston (Page 50-51) “Clothing. Accessories. Ideas.”
Still around - and sporting some crazy music. - Broadwing (Page 52-53) “If there’s a weak link in a voice, data and video network, we’ll hunt it down and kill it. Now doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?”
Aquired by Level 3 Communications, Inc. - Akamai (Page 74-75) “This This it is Rocket Science - Get Akamaized Today!”
Still around, and gobbling up other companies. - Microsoft Windows2000 Professional (Page 76-77) “Now you have the technology to work during your vacation. Does that mean you’ll be doing more work, or taking more vacation?”
Still around. The URL they used in the ad is dead, but it would take a behemoth to kill Microsoft. - Centra (Special 4 page insert between page 80-81) “Live, Voice-Enabled Internet Collaboration”
Acquired by Saba.
I still subscribe to Business 2.0, and the most recent edition came in the mail the other day, a noticably smaller version than this 2000 one. Which of these companies of today are bound to be absorbed by other companies? Which of these advertisers don’t seem to have a clear business plan? Sometimes it seems obvious, but other’s we’ll just have to wait and see.
