The dotcom bubble has burst. Thank God for that.
Original article date: November 2001
The dotcom bubble has burst. Thank God for that. I for one was getting sick of not knowing who to trust. But I guess I need to explain that a bit. I have used a service now for many years called ‘bigfoot’. It is a fiendishly simple idea, namely that I have an “email address for life” and email sent to it is instantly forwarded to my ‘real’ email address. My real email address changes as often as my street address, but all that my friends and colleagues ever need to know is my bigfoot address.
Bigfoot has been supplying me this service free for several years, and that in itself is worrying. After all, you get what you pay for, don’t you? Bigfoot’s plan seemed to go something like this:
- For a few years we run this service for free
- Millions of people will sign up
- If we manage to hold it all together until then, there will come a day when we can announce that there is a charge, and a sufficient proportion of our customers will stay with us.
Of course, the third part of the business plan was built around a pretty big ‘if’. Once you give your clientele a service like bigfoot, they will route everything through it, and pretty soon you end up handling a huge amount of email traffic. The company has had to invest pretty significantly over the past few years, and though its actual website is pretty heavily peppered with paid advertising, I have only ever been there myself to check server status, so I cannot believe many other members go there much either.
Rather than being a tad miffed, it was with some relief that I received an email from the bigfoot admin team to say that the free service was no longer available except for occasional users, and that real users like me would have to pay.
Now I realise it’s going to sound odd that I was actually happy to find that something I had been getting for free for years was suddenly going to start costing me $20US per annum? But I was pleased firstly because it meant, most likely, that a stack of users who choose not to pay will be turfed off, so improving the service for the rest of us, and secondly because if bigfoot is charging for the service then I can be fairly sure that the company is making money. And this latter point really is key, because there’s o point in having an email address for life if the company supplying it goes bust.
This also helps to explain what I mean by saying that I’m glad the dotcom boom is over. Of all the great services that came on offer over the past few years – some of which you might seriously have come to rely on – there was rarely any way to really assess whether they were viable enough to survive. There have been many times that I’ve used something free and thought: “I’d willingly pay for this if they’d just make it do xyz as well, and if this would guarantee they’d still be around this time next year.”
Paying for the service I want
One of the reasons that I pay a TV licence fee is so that I don’t have to be annoyed by adverts on two of the channels. But through the dotcom years, countless companies seemed to blindly assume I’d rather get stuff free and download endless ads rather than just pay good honest money for a good honest useful service. And what annoyed me most is that no one ever asked me what I actually wanted. The dotcoms that are totally structured around advertising, rather than being structured around doing something useful for me and taking my money, are open to a plunge on the Nasdaq at any minute.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not averse to a free trial from time to time to make sure I like a particular service. I just hate the idea of a business model that depends on annoying the hell out of me with banner ads from another country and perpetually wasting my modem’s bandwidth, because I can almost guarantee that just when I get to like the service on offer, the company will go belly up due to inexplicable losses of several million dollars.
So in this post bubble era, let’s see a few more companies who are willing to look us in the eye and say: “This is our business plan – we take your money and give you this service. If you like us, chances are others will like it too, and we’ll survive. And if we find we are losing money, we will ask you if you’d rather we charged more or packed it in. We won’t just quietly go into stupendous debt then suddenly fold one day just when you have come to rely on us.”
After all, it’s actually in our interests that our suppliers make a profit, isn’t it?
November 2001