A Year in Life of the Internet

S A N   F R A N C I S C O,  Dec. 27 -- The dot-com fairy tale turned into amacabre farce this year as one e-commerce company after anotherflopped and business bystanders clucked about the stupidity of itall.

But it wasn’t so long ago that plenty of smart people thoughtselling dog food, plush sofas and barbecue grills over the Internetwere good ideas.

Today’s prevailing consensus about the absurdity of thesee-commerce concepts illustrates how much the dot-com landscape haschanged in the past 12 months. The Young Turks of the New Economy,once hailed as inspired visionaries, now widely are derided asshortsighted buffoons.

“There always have been dumb ideas in business, but you don’tusually see so many of them at one time,” said Philip Kaplan, whoruns a Web site with a profane name that features a satiricaldot-com dead pool for Internet failures.

It’s All Academic With These Guys

Marc Benioff, a former Oracle Corp. executive who is chairman ofSan Francisco-based Salesforce.com, said he couldn’t believe someof the business decisions made at other dot-com companies duringthe year.

“A lot of these guys were writing Harvard Business School casestudies, but they weren’t writing them on how to build abusiness,” Benioff said. “They were writing them on how to torcha business.”

Amid all the dot-com detritus, a few clever — and evenpotentially revolutionary — ideas emerged during 2000, too.

Here, then, is a look at some of the year’s dot-com duds anddelights:

Not Ready for Prime Time

Super Bowl XXXIV was billed as a coming-out party for the 13dot-com companies that shelled out an average of $2.2 million for30-second commercials aired during the game.

The ads were plenty slick, but they didn’t accomplish much — they mostly attracted customers who discovered that the featuredsites were more about style than substance.

“A lot of these companies forgot that good advertising onlymakes a bad product fail faster,” said Clark Wood, vice presidentof marketing for AutoTrader.com, one of the few e-commerce SuperBowl advertisers that didn’t regret spending all that money.