Welcome to Lachlan M. D. Cranswick's Personal Homepage in Melbourne, Australia - A Hard Hitting LMDC Expose - This evil web site destroyed two work days of my work productivity!!! - Highlights from the FuckedCompany.com site (the dot-com deadpool)

Lachlan passed away in January 2010. As a memorial, this site remains as he left it.
Therefore the information on this site may not be current or accurate and should not be relied upon.
For more information follow this link

(This Webpage Page in No Frames Mode)

Welcome to Lachlan Cranswick's Personal Homepage in Melbourne, Australia

A Hard Hitting LMDC Expose (August 2000)

(Highlights from the FuckedCompany.com site (the dot-com deadpool))

Lachlan's Homepage is at http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au

[Back to Lachlan's Homepage] | [What's New on Lachlan's Page] | [F'dCompany.com Expose] | [Despair.com Expose]

[Intro - CranClan] . . [Happening Things] . . [The Daresbury Laboratory Web Ring of Life] . . [NCS - Non-Competitive Scrabble] . . [Garden Gnomes of Daresbury Laboratory] . . [Nature and Local UK Things] . . [USA 2001 and LDEO Columbia University] . . [Historical Literature/Poetry] . . [Music] . . [Misc Things] . . [DL SRS Status] . . [Conference and Travel Things] . . [The Wonders of Team Building] . . [Other People's Homepages] . . [Crystallographic Internet Front] . . [While in Melbourne] . . [Semi Relevant Links]

Highlights from the FuckedCompany.com site (the dot-com deadpool))

B2B = business-to-business

VC = Venture capitalists

FuckedCompany.com Top 100 Point Scoring Users
(Documenting what must have been the bleeding obvious that was never reported in the mainstream media - until it was old news???!!!)

Background article: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/invest/in954.htm

F***edcompany.com up for sale (12/09/2000) ("I was bored this morning so I put FC on eBay," he said.): http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/13178.html
Tech Stock Tony: http://www.techstocktony.com/
After the gold rush: The state of America's bosses : The spectacular collapse of the accounting company Arthur Andersen is just the latest in a long line of failing big US companies. Is this about a handful of greedy bosses, asks Andrew Gumbel, or is it the end of fat-cat culture altogether? : 19 June 2002: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=306662
- "The most benign answer to those questions is that much of the current rot is a hangover from the dot.com bubble economy. Everyone, in a sense, got deluded. But that explanation is to ignore the egregious abuses that appear to have broken out all over the US financial system. The attorney general of New York state, Eliot Spitzer, recently sued the esteemed brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch on the grounds that while it was issuing strong encouragements to buy internet stocks, it was simultaneously heaping derision on those same stocks in internal company e-mails. Merrill Lynch chose to settle the case for $100m before any charges were brought."
- "In the wake of the Enron collapse and the subsequent scandals, there have been calls for accountancy reform and other measures. But it is astonishing how brazen the Bush White House and certain influential members of Congress have been in resisting all but the most modest steps in the right direction. Forcing companies to count stock option cash-outs as business expenses that must be deducted from their profit statements? President Bush is against it. Reinstating the accountancy firewall between auditing and consulting? Senior Republicans, including Senator Phil Gramm (a major recipient of Enron and financial industry largesse over the years), are fighting hard to kill the proposal in Congress.
  The amount of corporate money in politics has now reached epidemic proportions. Enron, to take the most flagrant example, had either employed or paid campaign contributions to two-thirds of the members of Congress and several dozen members of the Bush administration. And the politicians are seemingly unable to realise when it is time to stop returning their many favours. The establishment and the chancers have become all but indistinguishable."
Ghostsites - The Museum of E-Failure
- http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/index.shtml
Form 1040.com: Income Tax Return for Recently Laid-Off Dotcom Employees With No Job Prospects 2000: http://rad.geology.washington.edu/~tj/DotCom1040.jpg
Downside (The investor's reality check.): http://www.downside.com/
- Deathwatch (with graphs): http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html
  "Countdown to collapse.
  Downside's Deathwatch is a cash-flow analysis. The death date is simply the day the company will run out of cash, based on their reported liquid assets and loss rate. When the cash runs out, something bad for stockholders has to happen.
  Deathwatch is an automated screen, based on the company's 10-K and 10-Q filings in the SEC's EDGAR database."
- Misery Row (with graphs): http://www.downside.com/miseryrow.html
  "12.18.2000 - The Golden Life Raft - the rule change that made the Internet bubble possible
  Until the late 1990s, the Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 144 generally required that insiders hold their stock for two years after an IPO. That rule was changed on February 20, 1997 to allow insider sales much sooner. The boom in dumb IPOs followed shortly thereafter. Under the old rule, if the company tanked months after the IPO, management, and the venture capitalists, went down with the ship. The new rule provides a "golden life raft", allowing management and the VCs to cash out and watch from safety while the ship goes down without them.
  It's instructive to read the position of the National Venture Capital Association, the VC's trade association, when they were lobbying for this change: "The NVCA supports a further shortening of this holding period. This further shortening would enable venture capital funds to provide faster liquidity to fund investors, thereby increasing their returns and attracting more capital for investment in emerging growth companies." This is financial-speak for "let's party". That single rule change made the bubble possible. In retrospect, making insider sales easier was terrible public policy. The only people who benefit are those doing IPOs that shouldn't have been done at all."
Songs of the Great Depression: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/cherries.html
"The SEC requires companies to file "significant event" reports for disastrous events. These are worth reading. Quite often, you'll find disastrous "significant event" reports for which the company issued no press release. They're filed in EDGAR.:" http://www.sec.gov/edgarhp.htm
Goldman Sachs has done the following IPOs this past year
- At http://www.ipo-network.com/underwriters/Goldman_Sachs.html
nothing-ventured.com: http://www.nothing-ventured.com/
- Example of Bizzbuild.com: http://www.nothing-ventured.com/Market/summary.asp?EPIC=BZB
Blow the Dot Com out your Ass.com - .com protest site
- At http://www.blowthedotoutyourass.com/
Gomez.com: Buying on-line companies rating system: http://www.Gomez.com/
Webmergers.com Shutdowns Report: http://www.webmergers.com/editorial/001125_shutdownreport.php
Webmergers.com: http://www.webmergers.com/
Soul-Searching Time at Online News Unitsq: http://ojr.usc.edu/content/story.cfm?request=530
eToy's sarcastic send-off to bankrupt namesake: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/18687.html | http://www.eToy.com/statement.html | http://www.eToy.com/

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=61
Cows have testicles
   Nutrition.com
   Not really a fuck, but funny nonetheless. "Could there be cow 
    testicles in your herbal supplement" Cows are female, right?
   When: 8/4/2000
   Company: Nutrition.com
   Points: 101

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=531
Oh god, make it stop
   Flake.com
   Flake.com was a portal for breakfast cereal. I don't 
   think you heard me. FLAKE.COM WAS A PORTAL FOR
   BREAKFAST CEREAL. I like breakfast cereal like the 
   next guy, but sites like these make me so angry - not to
   mention VCs who support crap like this. "I'm discouraged, 
   and I'm essentially broke" says the founder.
   When: 6/16/2000
   Company: Flake.com
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=541
The best press release ever
   USDI
   Official press release: "All of the directors and officers 
   of U.S. Digital Communications, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board:
   USDI) have resigned, effective immediately. Presently the 
   company has no employees, officers, or directors. The
   corporation has no assets, no revenues, and no money to 
   continue in business. In addition, the corporation does
   not have the capability to transact business in the future."
   When: 6/16/2000
   Company: USDI
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=541
Stealth-fuck
   egreetings.com
   You don't hear too much bad news about these guys. 
   But I do. Apparently Egreetings.com has been experiencing
   a mass exodus -- including more than half their engineering 
   department and most of marketing. The best part is
   that they actually threw a "Thanks for not quitting party" 
   for the remaining employees. 
   When: 6/16/2000
   Company: egreetings.com
   Points: 145

Spike founders ousted; company in ruins
   Spike.com.au & SpikeRadio.com
   At 1pm, Spike announced that he [the CEO] had resigned 
   because of failing health. But an investigation by the
   Herald has discovered that he was forced out. A bold expansion 
   into the United States market had faltered. Mr
   O'Hanlon also left behind a sexual harassment claim, a 
   mistress who allegedly stole $US53,000 from the company,
   and extravagant spending, including a $US267,000 launch 
   party for Spike's online radio station, SpikeRadio.com. 
   When: 6/11/2000
   Company: Spike.com.au & SpikeRadio.com
   Points: 145

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=641
These guys define hubris
   IAM.com
   Already having legal problems, these guys define hubris. 
   They are completely blinded by their arrogance, and I
   predict a fairly swift demise.
   When: 6/7/2000
   Company: IAM.com
   Points: 110

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=561
eBay buying Half.com
   ebay.com
   Okay, nobody is really fucked (more than normal) here. 
   But half.com?? This is the company that paid a toothless
   Oregon town to rename itself to "Half.com, Oregon". 
   When: 6/15/2000
   Company: ebay.com
   Points: 100

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=581
JP Morgan Site Disconnected
   JP Morgan
   They forgot to pay the $35 Network Solutions bill for the 
   jpmorgan.com domain name. Umm, so, yeah. I don't
   think you heard me. JP Morgan forgot to pay the $35 bill 
   for their domain name. 
   When: 6/14/2000
   Company: JP Morgan
   Points: 101

Employees Jump Ship as Legal Portal Sinks
   LawStreet.com
   Don't sue me, I didn't write it. But somebody did. And I'm 
   not sure if it's true or not. But here it is: After laying off
   alot of pople, others started to jump ship - screaming "FIRE" 
   along the way. They are now down to something like
   8 employees and have stopped buying toner for the laser printer 
   and stopped ordering bottled water. Yet, they
   are going out and trying to "make deals" with unknowing strategic 
   partners, making false statements about their
   financial backing and their business model.
   When: 6/14/2000
   Company: LawStreet.com
   Points: 120

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=591
Recording Industry Seeks Immediate Shutdown
   Napster
   Yes, we all love it. But let's be honest -- they're fucked. 
   The recording industry has asked a federal court judge
   for a preliminary injunction to shut down Napster as part of 
   its lawsuit against the popular Internet song-sharing
   service. 
   When: 6/14/2000
   Company: Napster
   Points: 171

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=541
   Another Dirtbag Bites the Dust
   moodycommunications.com
   Rumor: This is NOT a real press release, but it tells a story. 
   Apparently the New York Times and countless
   other vendors can confirm it. The fact that they are trying to 
   get $750 out of their domain name is truly the most
   pathetic thing I've seen in a very long time.
   When: 6/15/2000
   Company: moodycommunications.com
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=531
Employees Flee
   www.workexchange.com
   Rumor: In the last 3 months, the CEO, CTO, Two Directors 
   of Business Development, The Hr Manager, The
   Creative Director, The Office Manager, The Customer Care 
   Director have fled to other companies. After all that,
   someone else joined on as CEO. If someone wants to piolt the 
   titanic, who can stop them?
   When: 6/16/2000
   Company: www.workexchange.com
   Points: 182

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=481
Ariba, ariba
   yupi.com
   Yupi.com, a major spanish portal based on Miami Beach, 
   has let go a dozen staffers. Chief Executive Oscar Con
   says that was part of a restructuring, not cost cutting. 
   Funny how all these dot-coms decided to "restructure" at
   pretty much the same time...
   When: 6/20/2000
   Company: yupi.com
   Points: 143

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=671
Ask Jeeves Searching For Answers
   Ask Jeeves
   Ask Jeeves announced Wednesday that Ted Briscoe 
   will be resigning as COO to become CEO of a private
   start-up. CEO Robert Wrubel predicted one year ago 
   this month that Ask Jeeves would become profitable within
   24 months. Given the Q1 loss of $47 million, that's just 
   not going to happen.
   When: 5/31/2000
   Company: Ask Jeeves
   Points: 140

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
Excellent
   HahahahaHAHAHAHAHHHHA Hahahahahahaha hahahAHAhahaha
   hahAHAHAHaha hahahahahah ahha HA HA HA HA HAH!!!!!!!!!!!!
   Network Commerce sent a memo to vendors explaining that 10%
   of their pay will be in "UBarter Dollars". HAHAHAHAHAahaha. okay
   done.
   When: 8/16/2000
   Company: Network Commerce
   Severity: 15
   Points: 115


http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=491
Things are ugly at BeautyJungle.com
   BeautyJungle.com
   Word on the street is that Beautyjungle.com is doin' that 
   wacky new dance all the kids are doin' these days, "The
   layoff get-the-fuck-out cha-cha."
   When: 6/20/2000
   Company: BeautyJungle.com
   Points: 126

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=511
AltaVista employees searching for jobs
   altavista.com
   AltaVista has laid off over 50 employees. "Frankly, 
   my view is the Internet industry, the craze around the
   Internet, ultimately caused unhealthy behavior," said 
   AltaVista chief executive Rod Schrock. Couln't have said it
   better myself.
   When: 6/19/2000
   Company: altavista.com
   Points: 119

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/search.cfm?search=rumor
Munching carpet
   Carpet.com
   Rumor has it that Carpet.com was purchased by a 
   few clowns wishing to bring flooring to the masses. After
   spending $500,000 on the domain name, the idea 
   languished. The site was up for about 1 week in July and has
   been down ever since.
   When: 8/14/2000
   Company: Carpet.com
   Points: 120

Screw the peace corps -- I'm gonna be a sys admin
   TalkCity.com
   Rumor has it that 35 were fired and contractors were welcomed 
     and encouraged to stay working as volunteers --
   because it's so fun to work and not get paid. 
   When: 7/24/2000
   Company: TalkCity.com
   Points: 167

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=521
Somerfield shuts down online shop
   somerfield.co.uk
   British supermarket chain Somerfield announces it is 
   shutting down its 9-month-old online shopping service on
   June 25. 228 jobs will be "affected". (what does that mean, Daddy?)
   When: 6/19/2000
   Company: somerfield.co.uk
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=511
My fuck-detector (modified spidey-sense) is going crazy
   craft.com
   Craft.com has discontinued all benefit programs including 
   coupons, shopping credits, introductory free shipping,
   and more. As a special added bonus, the site is down as I write this...
   When: 6/19/2000
   Company: craft.com
   Points: 175

We don't need no stinkin marketing
   zland.com
   Rumor has it that the entire marketing department 
    was let go today. No severance pay. 
   When: 7/18/2000
   Company: zland.com
   Points: 170

Wife beater dot-com
   myweddingplans.com
   MyWeddingPlans.com is a site that you are supposed to 
   rely on to help plan your wedding. The site has been
   down for quite a while and the telephone is disconnected, 
   leaving many brides with valuable information lost and
   many weddings disorganized. This should serve as a 
   warning not to rely too much on a fucked company. Tough
   love.
   When: 7/18/2000
   Company: myweddingplans.com
   Points: 195

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=441
Linuxcare withdraws IPO
   Linuxcare
   Linuxcare, provider of services for the Linux operating system, 
   requested that its planned initial public offering to
   net approximately $56.6 million be withdrawn. "Market conditions..."
   When: 6/22/2000
   Company: Linuxcare
   Points: 134

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=461
Verde almost gone
   Verde.com
   Verde Media, an environmental site powered by granola 
   bars and trail mix, laid off its editorial and production
   staff. Pave the globe -- free parking for everyone. 
   When: 6/21/2000
   Company: Verde.com
   Points: 190

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=461
Whole Foods Market Announces Restructuring of E-Commerce Operations...
   WholePeople.com
   Some call it a "partnership", others call it a FUCK.
   When: 6/21/2000
   Company: WholePeople.com
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=461
This site was a good idea...
   MiniDiscNow.com
   According to their site, this company ceased operation 
   March 5 -- and on March 17, and on May 3, and on June
   14. It's the longest and loudest suicide note I've ever 
   seen from a fucked company. They're now asking for
   "capital contributions". You can read their "prospectus". 
   One useful contribution would be to buy the site designer
   a new guide dog.
   When: 6/21/2000
   Company: MiniDiscNow.com
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=451
2 legit, 2 legit to Launch
   360hip-hop.com
   "360 Hip Hop" is Russell Simmons' entry into the online "urban" 
   marketplace (you know what that means...). It was
   set to launch June 20 @ 6:30 pm. It launced and was live for 
   a total of 45 seconds. Now it's back in "coming
   soon" mode...
   When: 6/22/2000
   Company: 360hip-hop.com
   Points: 103

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=441
Fried to a crisp
   BBQ.com
   BBQ.com gave up and laid everyone off. They were a VC 
   funded startup offering barbecuing tips on the Web. 
   What. The. Fuck.
   When: 6/23/2000
   Company: BBQ.com
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=301
No one can pay the piper
   GMN.com
   Rumor has it that half the office space will be let go, 
   most management down to half-time, and everyone else
   polishing their resumes for all they're worth...
   When: 7/7/2000
   Company: GMN.com
   Points: 175

Visualcom fires many
   VisualCom.com
   Rumor has it that VisualCom.com just fired their CTO, 
   IT Director, and all of their network administrators. They're
   left with about 26 marketing and sales people -- who 
   are hoping the systems don't crash anytime soon...
   When: 7/17/2000
   Company: VisualCom.com
   Points: 150

CEO resigns
   b2bStores.com
   As previously seen on FC, b2bStores.com raised $35 
   million on its IPO and announced sales of only $6000. Yes,
   that is a six with three zeros. Well, their CEO just 
   resigned. Lookin good for this future FC hall-o-famer..!
   When: 7/17/2000
   Company: b2bStores.com
   Points: 194

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=431
Good deficit, bad deficit
   CASCAP.com
   Apparently the president of Cascap.com told staff yesterday 
   that, "there's good deficit and bad deficit -- we
   have good deficit, which means that we've only lost $300,000 
   for the year overall and need to downsize only 5 or
   6 people." Getting... angry... can't... control... rage.... AAAARGH!!!
   When: 6/23/2000
   Company: CASCAP.com
   Points: 105

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=251
@Road Cancels IPO
   atroad.com
   Those "unfavorable market conditions" are tough. What 
   does the market want? Profits? Sound market concepts?
   When: 7/11/2000
   Company: atroad.com
   Points: 180

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=341
B2B or Not To Be
   ineed.com
   Rumor has it that their money plug made a big sucking sound. 
   Additional funding couldn't be secured and about 12
   people have lost their jobs. Word on the street is that they 
   are closing shop.
   When: 7/5/2000
   Company: ineed.com
   Points: 185

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=251
Umm, yeah
   DoughNet.com
   This is a financial planning site for kids. This is not a 
   good idea. All but 5 of the 75 staff were told essentially,
   "the school bus will be leaving early today for the last time... 
   place all your crayons and finger paints in you
   bag... have nice life."
   When: 7/11/2000
   Company: DoughNet.com
   Points: 195

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=261
AviationX crashes
   AviationX.com
   Rumor has it that AviationX crashed brilliantly -- 
   raised $1.6M in cash and burned through it in 3 months flat.
   Apparently there are great pickings in the ashes -- 
   $1,200 desks, $400 chairs. These guys knew how to live...
   When: 7/10/2000
   Company: AviationX.com
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=271
Exit interview without fear
   SaltMine.com
   Employees at saltmine.com felt compelled to forward 
   this goodbye email to FuckedCompany.com. Apparently it
   was sent to the CEO and CC'ed to the entire company.
   When: 7/10/2000
   Company: SaltMine.com
   Points: 110
   http://www.fuckedcompany.com/extras/saltmine_email.html


http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=211
Talk City says, "shut the fuck up"
   TalkCity.com
   Rumor has it they laid off 40 people. More to come...
   When: 7/10/2000
   Company: TalkCity.com
   Points: 139

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=211
iCopious folds
   iCopious.com
   Rumor has it that iCopious.com is having *major* 
   problems. I'll just leave it at that...
   When: 7/13/2000
   Company: iCopious.com
   Points: 199  

Insert joke here
   LifeJacketStore.com
   This is just way too easy -- I'm not even going to 
   comment on this one. LifeJacketStore.com says,
   "LifeJacketStore.com, Inc. has ceased doing business 
   due to a lack of expansion funding." Okay fine one
   comment: you never seem to have one when you need one.
   When: 7/20/2000
   Company: LifeJacketStore.com
   Points: 200

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=81
Softmart pleads guilty to fraud
   Softmart
   Softmart reported $1M in apparently-phony sales to 
   Microsoft to cash in on an MS rebate deal. Trying to fuck Bill
   out of $1M is definitely a capital offence. :)
   When: 7/31/2000
   Company: Softmart
   Points: 125

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=41
How to get to Fuckwit, Idaho?
   MapQuest.com
   Rumor has it that in the past few months the NYC HQ has gon
      e from about 30 to about 6 with the CEO making
   only cameo appearances.
   When: 8/8/2000
   Company: MapQuest.com
   Points: 165


http://www.fuckedcompany.com/archives/index.cfm?startrow=51
LeisurePlanet is no more
   LeisurePlanet.com
   UK travel site Leisureplanet.com has called in the receivers. 
   A spokesman for UK travel site LeisurePlanet.com said
   said it was forced to make a move as a "direct consequence 
   of the changed market conditions whereby capital is
   no longer available to fund ambitious business-to-consumer 
   plans that incur losses". In British English I think that
   means "Oh shit, we've gone arse over tit, mate."
   When: 8/7/2000
   Company: LeisurePlanet.com
   Points: 195

   That cartoon Boo.com chick is cute though
   fashionmall.com
   I actually received a $50 gift certificate from Boo.com a 
   few days before they folded, so I never had a chance to
   cash it in. While we're on the subject, Fashionmall.com, 
   which bought the stinking, maggot-infested corpse of
   Boo.com, is now planning to relaunch it. Boo.com's newly 
   installed president Kate Buggeln immediately
   demonstrated her ineptitude by proceeding to insult and 
   patronise its potential customers on cnet.com. "While
   analysts and techno-geeks know of Boo.com's troubles," 
   she said, "most of its everyday customers are not
   concerned with such things. Susie Shopper doesn't care 
   about that stuff." I think Susie Shopper should open a
   can of whoop ass on her.
   When: 8/7/2000
   Company: fashionmall.com
   Points: 101

From the comments area:

Words
"We regret to inform you that as of 11/27/00 we have shut down our service," says e-lingo.com's homepage.

So where are people gonna get this stuff now? - 11/29/2000 08:39 AM EST
"elingo is the leading internet translation infrastructure company and provider of online machine translation solutions to major e-businesses around the world. elingo develops and hosts a platform of best-of-breed, private-label, real-time language translation solutions. Services include translated search, text, e-mail, chat, instant messaging, and Web browsing, allowing e-businesses to focus on their own core competencies. Through its partnership and alliances with Inktomi Corporation and leading machine translation vendors, elingo provides portals, email outsourcers, e-commerce and content sites the highest quality internet translation services available, enabling a dramatic increase in available content and access to vast new online audiences."

=====

"Aye, Cap'n! There's trouble in the double-talk generator!"

"Scotty! I need double-talk, and I need it now!"

"Not wi'oot new e-commerce crystals, Cap'n! The vast new internet audience is being disenabled through the portal!"

"Can you fix it, Scotty? Jury-rig something?"

"We're best o' breed and private-label now, Cap'n! The power's being shut off!"

"Inktomi ... instant messaging ... e-mail ... thousands of people, and they all were depending on me. Mr. Spock, meet me in the transporter room, and bring your core competency with you."

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Full service
Rumor has it Agency.com laid off around 190 people. I also hear they closed the ever-profitable Vail office. We're in for a bloodbath next quarter, people.

It used to be that this business was fun: meet user, write code, fix code, go home fat and happy. But when you get on the hook with a VC, it seems you're making a commitment to a 55 - 100 % margin on every transaction. Code just doesn't work that way. 20 % of the good coders are giving it away in GNU licenses probably out of boredom, simply because the margins on really challenging IT just aren't there.

Which keeps us writing XML for Taiwanese porn sites rather than Peer reviewing medical device code.

Thanks for the tip...
Rumor has it, after laying off 50 people a few months ago, Extend.com secretly laid off 60 more yesterday after committing its soon to be former employees to sign an NDA -- not to disclose this information.

Flash is evil. But this site is more evil than even Macromedia could have ever envisioned:

Subscreens pop-up on some clicks, yet other clicks just change the current screen

Obvious candidates for mouse-overs don't react, while other, NOT obvious objects ARE mouse-overs

The fucker freezes every browser you own - I have IE 5, NS 4.7x, NS 6 (yeah, I'm a glutton for punishment) -- all cough up hairballs until quit and restart on my OS (Mac's shit 9.0.4 - maybe W2K works better).

And the content is hilarious. Read the vision and partner pages - what language is the vision in? Is it related to making money? And the partners - partners HOW? (I can see it now - "We have a Mac and a PIII, so let's smear Apple and Intel as being our partners").

What an odious site.

Twas the night before Christmas
Old St. Nick busted out the AstroGlide and is having his way with eToys.com. Their holiday sales are less than half of what was expected, and apparently at their current rate, they've got till March.

House bound for last 2 years (12/18/2000 12:00 PM EST):

Because of the easiness of buying EVERYTHING on line...I haven't left my house for 2 years! I'm 200 pounds overweight and have bottlecap glasses from the glare of my screen....i have to buy toys for my nieces so I'm finally going outside....thank you etoys and ToyRus for cutting my ball and chain....

web servers (12/18/2000 12:26 PM EST):

Apparently, from what I hear, these guys had over 1,500 dual pentium web servers on standby to cope with the christmas demand... now that is enough to serve Yahoo 4 times over, these guys didnt have pageviews anywhere near that, they could have run the site just fine on 4 of them.
Unless of course they had NT installed... when erm, yeah 1500 sounds about right!

Drive-thru
"carOrder is not currently accepting new orders," says their site. There's another $100M down the toilet...

TallOrder:

Their jobs page says
Minimum 3 years experience with web design and e-commerce web applications
When was the term "e-commerce" coined? Are they looking for the guy who invented ecommerce?

re: TallOrder: (12/18/2000 11:30 AM EST)

Their jobs page says
Don't know about you guys, but I've seen one asking for 10 years experience with Java. Beat that :)

Merry Christmas, go home
Rumor has it about 175 employees were canned at Onvia.com... They keep doing this.

I recommend slicing up the wrist, not across.

and use plenty of warm water - helps speed up the bleeding. Laying off 185 this month, how many the other month? Enough of the dribbling, percoset and Bailey's suicide scene - cut the jug and take your bow.

re: Holy shit batman!!: (12/19/2000 08:49 AM EST)

Negative gross margins would not only infer that they are giving it away, they are paying people to take it.

The Mass of the Management Team: (12/19/2000 01:04 PM EST)

How can a company this size support this volume of Vice Presidents? General Motors probably has fewer VPs!
Anytime I see this volume of humanity on a dot com executive team - in the words of George Carlin - "I don't know if I almost puked!"

Too obvious
I won't even bother with a funny headline... Funeral site HeavenlyDoor.com died. Rumor has it they lost about $22M in the process...

Road kill of the information superhighway

Normall I make fun of dead dot coms .
This one leaves me speachless !!

The problem was shipping (12/19/2000 12:53 AM EST)

I used HeavenlyDoor.com and set up "My HeavenlyDoor".
When Uncle Ed died last month, I packed him in a box and sent him off for a proper funeral. Actually, because of the 75lb weight restriction with UPS, I had to send 3 boxes. But still, off he went.
Two weeks later I get a return box from HeavenlyDoor saying that because they only received 1 of 3 boxes, they were returning it to me.
What's up with that?
It's poor customer service like that, that will kill a company. I'm not surprised they went under.
If anyone finds one or both of the missing boxes, e-mail me at "fivefivefive/onetwoonetwo.com.
Thanks.

re: The problem was shipping

This just shows again that those bastards at UPS just won't haul for shit anymore.
And HeavenlyDoor ends up as roadkill, while UPS lobbies Congress to carry First Class mail.
Where's the justice? WHERE'S THE JUSTICE?
And where are this poor guy's boxes?

re: The problem was shipping

hmm, didn't they give you an RMA number?
This is why only clicks and bricks funeral service plays are going to make it. Without a real brick and mortar funeral parlor to bury the other 2/3, you were left hanging!

Pack your eBags
eBags.com laid off 23 people -- 25% of staff. Just curious, how many people need to work at an e-commerce site that sells bags? One? Two? One programmer and one accountant/buyer should do the trick. Like, the site just fucking sits there and sell BAGS. IT'S A COMPUTER PROGRAM. IT DOES STUFF AUTOMATICALLY. Dammit I'm pissed now.

Don't be pissed

Listen Pud, it takes about 23 people to;
"host monthly fun employee events - happy hours, putt-putt golf tournaments, barbecues, trips to amusement parks, etc." and to maintain the "foosball table, Nerf basketball and other toys and games on site."

Bags for your balls

A site that just sells bags huh? When will the site that just sells balls go down?
http://www.balls.com

Room for 2 ball sites?

http://www.justballs.com/jbstore/
this must be a really hot "space"

re: Don't be pissed

oh god thats awful. is that a joke?
http://ebags.recruitingcenter.net/publicjobs/canviewjobs.cfm

Why so many people, Pud?

Well, as the earlier poster said, there's a LOT of employee activities. That takes a passle of folks to organize - and the activities take up a lot of employee time, so you need people to cover for critical periods like hiking trips and shit.
And they were hiring like crazy, to keep up with the insatiable demand, so EVEN more people needed to be hired to find the foos balls that flew off the table and got lodged under the beanbag chairs.
But mainly, once again, management takes a rap for what had to be slack-tit techies. Look at the site. The part called "About eBags". All the bios. And pix. Gigs of information to be stored and distributed so these jackoffs could see their finely-photographed mugs on the Web.
Of course, ANY company struggling to make it public - or to another round of funding - needs to have an enormous database on-line to show off the enormous employee population. And that's a lot of maintenance and information handling.
The techies fucked 'em. Just couldn't get those bits out there fast enough, cheap enough. Not a case of bad judgment by self-infatuated management. Nossirree, Bob.

re: egads.. they have profiles of ALL THE EMPLOYEES

I am most amused by the different titles.
"Creative Services Manager, ConcourseZ". What?
"Operations Applications Analyst". What is that?
"Direct Marketing Writer". Someone actually has a job writing spam.
My favorite is "Manager, Relationship Marketing". Why is "relationship marketing" different than regular marketing? Guess I'm too much of a "techie" to understand all that marketing stuff.

re: Fuck me!

> okay, that was too easy.
No, it's the employees who are too easy.
"Dying is easy, it's comedy is hard - rejoice in the cheapshots that come your way". - Wilde...
...or Moliere - or fuck, maybe I just spiced it up. I'm still troubled by the giant employee page at eBags.

emarketing ebag ecrap

http://www.avenuea.com/showcase/ebags.asp
these guys did the 'emarketing' for ebags, and according them ebags is a huge success story (as is drugstore.com)
...things that make you go hmmm..

www.bagit.com

Take a look at this bag site, www.bagit.com.
The are running it with out VC money.

re: www.bagit.com

So I checked it out. On a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being high, the bagit.com hit about 2.5 on my personal scale.
I have read some of the comments on ebags.com , but not all. What I have not seen is talk of net revenue expected per employee. Ebags obviously doesn't have a workable target. We compete with them in some areas - in the golf bag arena - and have elected not to carry products that they carry - simply because a profit of $6 an order isn't worth it. It takes me just as long to process an order for $1000 as it does for an order for $30. We aim for at least a 30% gross profit per order - so when I compare $200 profit to $6 for 30 minutes of work - I lose money with the $20 order (net profit is much lower than gross profit). Another post said something to the effect that you only needed a progammer and an accountant to run ebags. I disagree. I am not a programmer - but am computer literate. I am not an accountant - but am tax literate. We are now in our third year of ecommerce. Our site is not flashy - but works for many customers. Our ratio of people to gross sales is 1 to $350,00. We are also a company of 1 - computer and tax literate - no programmers or accountants. Since we(I) work long, long hours - and have a good technical background - i will say that if we can do it on a ratio of 1:350,000 that others should look for a minimum target of 1:200,000. That is, every employee should be able to generate at least $200,000 in sales per year. You then should factor in their overhead - )e.g., marketing - and all the other obtuse ebags positions) - obviously they overlooked some small details in their business plan. What is really sad is that all the VC guys also don't understand that they should focus on revenue/potential generated per employee. I haven't done the figures for Amazon.com - my pencil doesn't much lead -
Shelley
ladiesgolfclubs.com.

Not **completely** fucked

Don't count them out yet. Their business model is sound -- luggage is expensive to carry in physical inventory in a retail store -- big air-filled items take up a lot of room. That's why most stores that sell bags have such a lousy selection. The guys who came from Samsonite know the luggage business on which they based this dot-com. That's more than you can say for a lot of dot-coms -- like MVP.com, which was the brainchild of John Elway and a couple of his cokehead stockbroker friends, who didn't know sports, didn't know technology, didn't know retail, didn't know anything except the scent of money to be made. Feh.
I've bought from eBags and think the user reviews are worth more to a purchaser than zipping the zippers in a store -- "This bag tips over when fully packed" or "It holds more than it looks" aren't something you'd figure out on your own.
Nevertheless, I picked both eBags and MVP.com (along with every other Denver-based dot-com -- having covered them as a reporter, I know most of 'em ain't worth diddly) and would have gotten some points off the fucking of both companies if pud hadn't arbitrarily reset everybody's fucks a few months back.

re: Not **completely** fucked

> having covered them as a reporter
To the previous poster: since you've covered these companies, do you believe ebags.com when they say, "1,025,138 Units Successfully Shipped" (the statistic is on their web page)? That number seems very high.
Just wondering if you know anything about this. Thanks.

How many people does it take to run a dot com

Once the site has been created, you can probably let go most of your web development staff. Buyers and other retail people are more important. The next generation of dot com's will have to be run much more like a traditional brick and mortar.

re: Not **completely** fucked

> Amazon does something like what you've described...Some books get nothing *but* bad reviews
No shit? Maybe because THEIR business involves the service promise of one million titles. What are the odds that all one million titles are all four stars and above?
Meanwhile - check out the eBags site. If you're strong of stomach. Limited selection, and every bag is either above average or unrated. Like a Lake Woebegone for Bags.
Not comparable to Amazon, no way no how.

merry christmas, ebags employees and others

The shakeout of failed dot-coms is tough on everyone, amusing to some, and a good lesson for us all.
Nobody at ebags will "change history" (how does one change history, anyway?), or even make history. But they're mostly decent folks doing the best job they can... and they'll learn from this and go on to real jobs soon enough.
The VCs are santa claus for most of them.. they funded a learning experience for a lot of them.. on the job training is much more valuable than anything you learn in school.
And no, it doesn't take 100-odd folks to run a luggage-selling web site. as i posted earlier, check out luggage.com.
there are exactly two people running that enterprise. but anyway, merry christmas to everyone, and best wishes for 2001.
back to the vitriol :)

Fishy
Since I've started including web consultancies here (marchfirst, scient, etc) and not just dot-coms, there's been popular demand for a Razorfish fuck... Consultancies don't really count cuz there's nothing inherently wrong with the business model of "pay us money and we'll make you a web site" -- particularly if you're good -- like Razorfish. Still, ya got layoffs, law suits and stuff... For your slanderous enjoyment, here ya go..

Place is going to the dogs 1/4/2001 08:05 PM EST

98 :: fanatastic fun, great work
99 :: more work, still plenty of fun
00 :: work dries up, we party while rome burns
01 :: we go home now
Thanks.

Wonderful news - When: 1/18/2001
I'm proud to announce that JustBalls.com -- a site that sells balls -- just received $13 million in funding. Yes, I'm serious.

I like Mad Dog 20/20 better than Cisco
Cisco Systems - Rumor has it Cisco doesn't want the bad press for laying people off -- so instead they've put 5 to 10% of their workforce, mainly sales and installation engineers, on what they call "program." (sounds evil, doesnt it?) The "program" gives each employee 30-days to meet "standards of performance" often higher than 150% last year's targets. If they don't hit the standards, they're forced to resign.

re: how 'bout them layoffs 3/22/2001 07:01 AM EST

YOUR FIRED! GET YOUR SHIT AND GET OUT!

Security? Show this young person whats behind door number one. Yes...thats the one...the one with the EXIT sign above it.

quote:
Originally posted by csco_insider:
What groups where are getting trimmed?

I'm in a group that got a "B+" on profit contribution. What the heck does that mean?

Beenz.com
Beans beans good for your heart: Over 180 people (70%) have been laid off or quit Beenz.com in the past few months. Me thinks beenz = throwing away your money.

re: FC supporter 3/29/2001 09:23 AM EST

I left beenz to work for an investment house. Philip Letts came in with his new (soon to be fucked) company BarterTrust.com asking for a loan. He gave beenz as a reference so my boss asked me about him. I'll try to get a copy of the rejection letter. NEVER give a company you've fucked as a reference

Fandom.com
Fandom.com - Fandumb: After apparently fucking AnotherUniverse.com, lying to their employees all year, and promising in December to give Christmas bonuses in MARCH (which never happened -- but it forced employees to stay put), Fandom.com is done. Lots of ex-employees angry about this one... here are some highlights. "The heartless, dim-witted execs wouldn't know how to run a dot-com if an endless source of cashflow dripped from their assholes." "Hope the company gets as good a treatment in hell as they gave their employees." And finally, "The execs and Satan can fuck each other up the butt for eternity." I'm noticing a theme here....

Incontinentia Buttocks 4/3/2001 06:17 PM EST

Quote: Originally posted by Urethra Franklin:

And WHAT'S SO FUNNY about Biggus Dickus ?
BIGGUS........DICKUS?

Amazon.com
Amazon.com - $$$: You need to be a bit of an accountant to get a woody off this one, but this is a classic fucked company move. Raise money through convertible debt (i.e. your debtor can turn the money you owe into stock, so you never really have to pay back the debt with real money, just with your "valuable" stock). Amazon.com raised $1.8 Billion this way. The conversion price for the stock was $70-per-share. With Amazon stock around $9-per-share today, it's not worth the cyber-paper it's cyberly printed on to wipe your cyber butt. So Amazon has to pay back the $1.8 billion in *cash*...

not first yet again! 4/4/2001 03:36 AM EST

hah! all your not first are belong to us! hahahahahahaha

janitor61 4/4/2001 09:48 AM EST

AHH but did you think of THIS!?
Its easy to see how you guys would be fooled into thinking that amazon.com is doomed. But if you actually take the time to look at it and anaylize the structures at work, its quite simple:
First of all the annuity on the indifferential depreciation coincides with the 3.04 Return rate quoted to me by the FCUG, I just got off the phone with them. They also told me, (I knew this was coming), that looking from the Keynesian Macroeconomical vantage, The keogh which alloted these accrued liens were performing a leveraged buy-out, diluting the HRV Tax dividend. Going in anylitically, You can see that the rotational rate of tangency (polar) of the Kernamm-Moler function against Production rates show increased tendencies twoards a hyperfluctual system.... a system that usually bumps the DH Sector breaching along with the FV margin! The Peller function coorelates the the Kernamm-Moler in that the co-vector asergance integral point is TOTALLY dependent upon the equity multiplier, tied up in export declarations and revolving collateral.. This brings the integral and the derivative of the functions and the GFC ratio down to around 40-50, maybe even 53 (i'd be suprised!!)
What was most shocking and what you people TOTALLY FORGOT was the ROI manouevers were NOT parallel to the solvency of the discretionary accrual.. They were AGAINST IT!!! AMAZON MUST OF SEEN THAT FROM THE BEGINNING... ACCOUNTING GENIUS!!

eFront.com
eFront.com - I'm Batman: Just when you thought they couldn't be any bigger con-artists, fuckedcompany favorite eFront.com stiffed their affiliates once again.
The bad news: With just 2 days notice, eFront affiliates will no longer receive the free hosting they were promised, according to this email.
The good news: eFront.com seems to be hosed.
Call me crazy, but I'd like to take some credit for the good news...

re: YES!!! DEATH to FREE HOSTING 4/5/2001 01:03 AM EST

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by dickwasher:
Fucking giving away FREE HOSTING, of all the stupid bonehead ideas of all time. Cut off the free hosting and you cut off the spammers balls! The only thing worse than free hosting is the pieces of shit that use it.
sorry, all i can say to this is TRUE, TRUE, TRUE. spammers need to die terrible deaths

re: Bring em down 4/5/2001 06:34 AM EST

quote:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by sweet:
Beeeeeee Boooooooooo
Efront is sinking like a ship..
People with low standards will inevitably think I'm a boor for pointing this out, but..
This is a poor allegory. The majority of ships are not sinking (they primarily get their usefulness from their buoyancy). Therefore the allegory does ships in general no justice. It'd be much fairer to simply say, "Efront is like a sinking ship."
Having said that, you have to feel for all the poor webmasters (essentially the rowers of this particular "ship"), who are chained to the lower decks, unable to escape.

Red Herring
Bass (with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads): Rumor has it Red Herring will be taking away all cell phones from reporters in the next month to save dough. Also, apparently around 10% of employees will be laid off as well.

Doctor Evil Throw me a bone here!

Are they ill-tempered sea bass?

Rational Software
Rations: Rumor has it Rational Software, the company whose cheezy tap-dancers and electronic drummers I watched at the last Internet World here in NYC, will lay off around 10% or 400 employees.

And let's not forget about (Un)ClearCase 4/6/2001 01:14 AM EST

Three cheers for Rational's awful code versioning system, ClearCase! It makes Visual Sourcesafe look intuitive, and CVS downright godlike. Who wants a versioning control system that's so complicated, it puts its own special filesystem onto your computer? Whose client machines have to run daemons in order to work? That often destroys the very code it is meant to protect?
On one project, they brought in a special guy just to run ClearCase. 3 months, and he never got it set up. But boy, did he bill hours. You can create a whole career around running Clearcase.
Then there was the project where they actually DID get it set up. That one was worse.
FUCK Rational, I say. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

Harbinger of d00m re: And let

Oh, this is too sweet! I actually think it would be a boost for the economy if we could get rid of Clear Case. Some ungodly licensing fee plus the need for a "special" clear case admin... for a shop of a dozen or two programmers?
Excuse me I need to go add another 500 users to my CVS tree.

evil_dad re: you are a sorry bunch

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by soft_qe:
What a bunch of crybabies!
Rational's products are made for REAL developers,
not children. Please redirect your energies into
learning something about software development.
Idiots!

Rational Products Suck, I've used them and after lots of therapy I can say there are better things. They're also extremely overpriced. UML is okay but Rational isn't, also the "Unified" process which is a cluster fuck. Booch should have left it alone!!! Besides developer is for film, I'm an Engineer and I use Together!

VOBkiller IRRATIONAL SOFTWARE

Absolutely true.... A big brokerage in downtown NYC switched to Rational Clearcase recently and even included management in some cheesy videos touting the positives for this piece of shit software. Several of my fellow colleagues and I soon bolted from the place after our duties transitioned to the "IRRATIONAL" migration from web development. Idiot managers can stick a VOB up their ass for pushing out this overcomplicated piece of shit. I want SourceSafe back!

another fucked lurker I think RATL tools work better than most...

just my two bits. I've tried testing tools up the yin-yang, and Robot and Visual Test work much better than Segue or Mercury shit. Purify, Quantify, and Coverage stuff work great for me as well. Clearcase is something I haven't used too much, so I cannot comment. Same dealio with Rose. Overall, I actually like their stuff because I get good results and they make me look good to management. Your mileage may vary. Don't run with scissors. Yada yada yada.

evil_dad re: you are a sorry bunch

Agreed, after Rational took them over they went downhill. However, there is something better than NuMega, costs more
called Insure++ (www.parasoft.com) I've used Insure++ everywhere and it's the best albeit a bitch to configure. And the sales people suck donkey balls for sure. :-p

BuildNet.com
BuildNot: Rumor has it around 170 employees, 2/3 of staff, will be laid off next week from BuildNet.com

BuildThisNOT.com 4/6/2001 10:08 AM EST

Hand out the life jackets.... this puppy is going down. Just like the movie Titanic...presented as unsinkable but when you hit the iceburg who gets first placement on the lifeboats.......hmmm

zUniversity.com
Zzzzz: zUniversity.com, who partners with universities to produce e-commerce sites, laid off 120 of 140 people. The great thing is, they shitcanned the entire tech staff, so the sites are gonna wither on the vine and die -- my guess -- pretty quickly.

sayonara Site will just run itself...

I've heard it called "gerbil mode" -- where you get rid of all the tech staff and the site will just run itself. No problem, programmers aren't changing code, right?!?!? Ha ha ha ha! Cracks me up.

alecto (Registered Sinner) I called this the day

. . . I got a spam from these people offering me a "lifetime email address" in some second rate domain name that was Z + "schoolname".com, like anyone would want that. Imagine the cachet and prestige of alumd00d@zmit.com. Not. And the "services" required giving up enough demographics to populate the mark-of-the-beast-database in Brussels. I think not.

Rocket scients
Scient: CFO resigned, 675 canned, 175 more to go, many others jumping ship... it's carnage.

re: straight into a wall 4/12/2001 04:06 AM EST

My employer hired Scient a bit back to execute on all kinds of pipe dreams they managed to sell to our execs. Despite the pleas from the IT staff about how lamebrained some of the ideas were, they went ahead anyway. After months and months and months of 40 plus consultants (i.e. fresh outta college kids) dragging out "scope analysis" meetings and "analyzing the core competencies" of the company, they give us wut would soon be known as the Scient Fiction document amongst the IT staff..We're talking 7 million plus for a 600 page document with useless use case diagrams, all kinds of buzz words, and best yet, 200 pages of the document was SQL code to build the tables they thought we'd need. Some of the earth shattering conclusions they made (we're a retailer by the way)....e-commerce sites should allow customers to buy things. REALLY!?!?!? So that's what our problem was! A basket system will be needed to facilitate said purchases. HOLY FUCK. Wish I thought'd of that. I wish I were exaggerating. I'm not. Sigh.

Crop failure
Greenhouseforstartups.com - Crop failure: "Greenhouse for Startups has been shut down." Good. Pretty pathetic when they can't even sit around and dream up new little FCs...

New Economy Janitor Put it all right in here, junior.

This company is NOT going out of business. I don't know where you get your information, but we are NOT, repeat NOT, going out of business.
If you bothered to check out our site, you'd see that GreenHouseForStartups.com was only the stealth-mode face on our enterprise.
The REAL business is starting up just now, taking all of the properties we've incubated and moving them "OUT" into the mainstream economy. So be sure to visit our Next Step Incubator:
OutHouseForStartups.com

Which one you have wanted to receive?
Hi, please go away : How toughtful, for the butt-plugs at Taos.com to fire their employees via email... the few who were not (yet) laid off received this pep-rally.

onceadotcommer - Sys Admin Haiku May 01 2001 08:45AM EST

billable hours?
lawyers aren't as expensive
and they're paid to screw

Alpha Gonad - Sys Admin Haiku May 01 2001 09:36AM EST

Originally posted by Picky, Picky!:
Issue is whether "hours" is one or two syllables. Dictionary.com says one.
The difference between "ours" and "hours" is that "ours" is one syllable and "hours" is two.
Dictionary.com is wrong. Maybe we should Ask Jeeves. I'm sure the answer is that he won't tell you whether he's gay or not.

is this bullshit - Sys Admin Haiku May 01 2001 10:22AM EST

Originally posted by Alpha Gonad:
The difference between "ours" and "hours" is that "ours" is one syllable and "hours" is two.
Dictionary.com is wrong. Maybe we should Ask Jeeves. I'm sure the answer is that he won't tell you whether he's gay or not
OED says one syllable. Back to the drawing board.

onceadotcommer - Dictionary Haiku for the Haiku-Critical May 01 2001 01:25PM

This is a haiku for those of you critical of my usage of hours as a two-syllable word:
the grammar nazis
goosestepping over my right
to butcher english
OR
I'm so sorry that
I failed to correctly count
the syllables in the last line.
OR
Webster: only one
dictionary.com: two
ME: you missed the point

Logical
LogicTier - Logical : Following their competitor, LoudCloud, rumor has it LogicTier died today. Lets clone Loudcloud, oh wait that idea sucks too...

onceadotcommer Obla Dee, Obla Da, Life goes on... May 04 2001 08:11AM EST

What happen.
Someone set up us the bomb.
We get signal.
What!
Main screen turn on.
It's you.
How are you gentlemen!
ALL of your internet infrastructure management are belong to us. You are on the way to descruction.
what you say!
You have no chance to survive make your time.
ha ha ha ha
Take off every zig.
You know what your doing.
move zig
for great justice
Marc Andreesen sucks ass.
So did Netscape, So does Logictier.

Logical
Goldman Sachs - Goldman Sucks : No more shitty dot-coms to take public, so the pompous fucks Goldman Sachs cut 150 investment bankers.

Uncle Schnikey You suck May 24 2001 10:32AM EST

Who's Pompus? Some Roman guy who worked at Goldman? Oh... you mean POMPOUS - you illiterate fuck.
Goldman may be a bunch of tools, but they can spell, you semi-retarded insult to shit spreaders.

Fargo When: 6/8/2001
Wells Fargo today disclosed that they lost over $1 billion on their venture capital portfolio. it's not funny, but for a company of financial "experts" to be investing in all these fucked companies, i gotta say... ha ha ha ha ha hah ah ah ahah aha hahah ahahahaah ah hahaha haha fools.

uhh When: 7/11/2001
Doctors believe they've found a way to fertilize an egg with cells from any part of the body, rather than sperm.
When: 7/11/2001
Company: Men
Severity: 50
Points: 150

The inhumane Internet When: 7/11/2001
About.com asked another 20 employees to bend over and grit their teeth. Apparently they got the news in the usual "come to an important meeting right away" (while we cut off your access) email.

Geegy When: 7/11/2001
Rumor has it ThirdGeek.com has been torn apart by a silent majority partner. Apparently the entire staff has left. Heh, just looking at the site, it's being redirected to Fuckedcompany. rock on!

Alive with pleasure! When: 7/11/2001
Rumor has it around one-third f Newport.com employees were shown the door this morning. From one employee, "it looked like the scene from Saving Private Ryan where everyone is wandering on the beach as they storm ashore."

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Full service Rumor has it Agency.com laid off around 190 people. I also hear they closed the ever-profitable Vail office. We're in for a bloodbath next quarter, people.
It used to be that this business was fun: meet user, write code, fix code, go home fat and happy. But when you get on the hook with a VC, it seems you're making a commitment to a 55 - 100 % margin on every transaction. Code just doesn't work that way. 20 % of the good coders are giving it away in GNU licenses probably out of boredom, simply because the margins on really challenging IT just aren't there. Which keeps us writing XML for Taiwanese porn sites rather than Peer reviewing medical device code.

Thanks for the tip... Rumor has it, after laying off 50 people a few months ago, Extend.com secretly laid off 60 more yesterday after committing its soon to be former employees to sign an NDA -- not to disclose this information.
Flash is evil. But this site is more evil than even Macromedia could have ever envisioned: Subscreens pop-up on some clicks, yet other clicks just change the current screen Obvious candidates for mouse-overs don't react, while other, NOT obvious objects ARE mouse-overs The fucker freezes every browser you own - I have IE 5, NS 4.7x, NS 6 (yeah, I'm a glutton for punishment) -- all cough up hairballs until quit and restart on my OS (Mac's shit 9.0.4 - maybe W2K works better). And the content is hilarious. Read the vision and partner pages - what language is the vision in? Is it related to making money? And the partners - partners HOW? (I can see it now - "We have a Mac and a PIII, so let's smear Apple and Intel as being our partners"). What an odious site.

Twas the night before Christmas Old St. Nick busted out the AstroGlide and is having his way with eToys.com. Their holiday sales are less than half of what was expected, and apparently at their current rate, they've got till March.
House bound for last 2 years (12/18/2000 12:00 PM EST): Because of the easiness of buying EVERYTHING on line...I haven't left my house for 2 years! I'm 200 pounds overweight and have bottlecap glasses from the glare of my screen....i have to buy toys for my nieces so I'm finally going outside....thank you etoys and ToyRus for cutting my ball and chain....
web servers (12/18/2000 12:26 PM EST): Apparently, from what I hear, these guys had over 1,500 dual pentium web servers on standby to cope with the christmas demand... now that is enough to serve Yahoo 4 times over, these guys didnt have pageviews anywhere near that, they could have run the site just fine on 4 of them. Unless of course they had NT installed... when erm, yeah 1500 sounds about right!

Drive-thru "carOrder is not currently accepting new orders," says their site. There's another $100M down the toilet...
TallOrder: Their jobs page says Minimum 3 years experience with web design and e-commerce web applications When was the term "e-commerce" coined? Are they looking for the guy who invented ecommerce?
re: TallOrder: (12/18/2000 11:30 AM EST) Their jobs page says Don't know about you guys, but I've seen one asking for 10 years experience with Java. Beat that :)

Merry Christmas, go home Rumor has it about 175 employees were canned at Onvia.com... They keep doing this.
I recommend slicing up the wrist, not across. and use plenty of warm water - helps speed up the bleeding. Laying off 185 this month, how many the other month? Enough of the dribbling, percoset and Bailey's suicide scene - cut the jug and take your bow.
re: Holy shit batman!!: (12/19/2000 08:49 AM EST) Negative gross margins would not only infer that they are giving it away, they are paying people to take it.
The Mass of the Management Team: (12/19/2000 01:04 PM EST) How can a company this size support this volume of Vice Presidents? General Motors probably has fewer VPs! Anytime I see this volume of humanity on a dot com executive team - in the words of George Carlin - "I don't know if I almost puked!"

Too obvious I won't even bother with a funny headline... Funeral site HeavenlyDoor.com died. Rumor has it they lost about $22M in the process...
Road kill of the information superhighway Normall I make fun of dead dot coms . This one leaves me speachless !!
The problem was shipping (12/19/2000 12:53 AM EST) I used HeavenlyDoor.com and set up "My HeavenlyDoor". When Uncle Ed died last month, I packed him in a box and sent him off for a proper funeral. Actually, because of the 75lb weight restriction with UPS, I had to send 3 boxes. But still, off he went. Two weeks later I get a return box from HeavenlyDoor saying that because they only received 1 of 3 boxes, they were returning it to me. What's up with that? It's poor customer service like that, that will kill a company. I'm not surprised they went under. If anyone finds one or both of the missing boxes, e-mail me at "fivefivefive/onetwoonetwo.com. Thanks.
re: The problem was shipping This just shows again that those bastards at UPS just won't haul for shit anymore. And HeavenlyDoor ends up as roadkill, while UPS lobbies Congress to carry First Class mail. Where's the justice? WHERE'S THE JUSTICE? And where are this poor guy's boxes?
re: The problem was shipping hmm, didn't they give you an RMA number? This is why only clicks and bricks funeral service plays are going to make it. Without a real brick and mortar funeral parlor to bury the other 2/3, you were left hanging!

Pack your eBags eBags.com laid off 23 people -- 25% of staff. Just curious, how many people need to work at an e-commerce site that sells bags? One? Two? One programmer and one accountant/buyer should do the trick. Like, the site just fucking sits there and sell BAGS. IT'S A COMPUTER PROGRAM. IT DOES STUFF AUTOMATICALLY. Dammit I'm pissed now.
Don't be pissed Listen Pud, it takes about 23 people to; "host monthly fun employee events - happy hours, putt-putt golf tournaments, barbecues, trips to amusement parks, etc." and to maintain the "foosball table, Nerf basketball and other toys and games on site."
Bags for your balls A site that just sells bags huh? When will the site that just sells balls go down? http://www.balls.com
Room for 2 ball sites? http://www.justballs.com/jbstore/ this must be a really hot "space"
re: Don't be pissed oh god thats awful. is that a joke? http://ebags.recruitingcenter.net/publicjobs/canviewjobs.cfm
Why so many people, Pud? Well, as the earlier poster said, there's a LOT of employee activities. That takes a passle of folks to organize - and the activities take up a lot of employee time, so you need people to cover for critical periods like hiking trips and shit. And they were hiring like crazy, to keep up with the insatiable demand, so EVEN more people needed to be hired to find the foos balls that flew off the table and got lodged under the beanbag chairs. But mainly, once again, management takes a rap for what had to be slack-tit techies. Look at the site. The part called "About eBags". All the bios. And pix. Gigs of information to be stored and distributed so these jackoffs could see their finely-photographed mugs on the Web. Of course, ANY company struggling to make it public - or to another round of funding - needs to have an enormous database on-line to show off the enormous employee population. And that's a lot of maintenance and information handling. The techies fucked 'em. Just couldn't get those bits out there fast enough, cheap enough. Not a case of bad judgment by self-infatuated management. Nossirree, Bob.
re: egads.. they have profiles of ALL THE EMPLOYEES I am most amused by the different titles. "Creative Services Manager, ConcourseZ". What? "Operations Applications Analyst". What is that? "Direct Marketing Writer". Someone actually has a job writing spam. My favorite is "Manager, Relationship Marketing". Why is "relationship marketing" different than regular marketing? Guess I'm too much of a "techie" to understand all that marketing stuff.
re: Fuck me! > okay, that was too easy. No, it's the employees who are too easy. "Dying is easy, it's comedy is hard - rejoice in the cheapshots that come your way". - Wilde... ...or Moliere - or fuck, maybe I just spiced it up. I'm still troubled by the giant employee page at eBags.
emarketing ebag ecrap http://www.avenuea.com/showcase/ebags.asp these guys did the 'emarketing' for ebags, and according them ebags is a huge success story (as is drugstore.com) ...things that make you go hmmm..
www.bagit.com Take a look at this bag site, www.bagit.com. The are running it with out VC money.
re: www.bagit.com So I checked it out. On a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being high, the bagit.com hit about 2.5 on my personal scale. I have read some of the comments on ebags.com , but not all. What I have not seen is talk of net revenue expected per employee. Ebags obviously doesn't have a workable target. We compete with them in some areas - in the golf bag arena - and have elected not to carry products that they carry - simply because a profit of $6 an order isn't worth it. It takes me just as long to process an order for $1000 as it does for an order for $30. We aim for at least a 30% gross profit per order - so when I compare $200 profit to $6 for 30 minutes of work - I lose money with the $20 order (net profit is much lower than gross profit). Another post said something to the effect that you only needed a progammer and an accountant to run ebags. I disagree. I am not a programmer - but am computer literate. I am not an accountant - but am tax literate. We are now in our third year of ecommerce. Our site is not flashy - but works for many customers. Our ratio of people to gross sales is 1 to $350,00. We are also a company of 1 - computer and tax literate - no programmers or accountants. Since we(I) work long, long hours - and have a good technical background - i will say that if we can do it on a ratio of 1:350,000 that others should look for a minimum target of 1:200,000. That is, every employee should be able to generate at least $200,000 in sales per year. You then should factor in their overhead - )e.g., marketing - and all the other obtuse ebags positions) - obviously they overlooked some small details in their business plan. What is really sad is that all the VC guys also don't understand that they should focus on revenue/potential generated per employee. I haven't done the figures for Amazon.com - my pencil doesn't much lead - Shelley ladiesgolfclubs.com.
Not completely fucked Don't count them out yet. Their business model is sound -- luggage is expensive to carry in physical inventory in a retail store -- big air-filled items take up a lot of room. That's why most stores that sell bags have such a lousy selection. The guys who came from Samsonite know the luggage business on which they based this dot-com. That's more than you can say for a lot of dot-coms -- like MVP.com, which was the brainchild of John Elway and a couple of his cokehead stockbroker friends, who didn't know sports, didn't know technology, didn't know retail, didn't know anything except the scent of money to be made. Feh. I've bought from eBags and think the user reviews are worth more to a purchaser than zipping the zippers in a store -- "This bag tips over when fully packed" or "It holds more than it looks" aren't something you'd figure out on your own. Nevertheless, I picked both eBags and MVP.com (along with every other Denver-based dot-com -- having covered them as a reporter, I know most of 'em ain't worth diddly) and would have gotten some points off the fucking of both companies if pud hadn't arbitrarily reset everybody's fucks a few months back.
re: Not completely fucked > having covered them as a reporter To the previous poster: since you've covered these companies, do you believe ebags.com when they say, "1,025,138 Units Successfully Shipped" (the statistic is on their web page)? That number seems very high. Just wondering if you know anything about this. Thanks.
How many people does it take to run a dot com Once the site has been created, you can probably let go most of your web development staff. Buyers and other retail people are more important. The next generation of dot com's will have to be run much more like a traditional brick and mortar.
re: Not completely fucked > Amazon does something like what you've described...Some books get nothing but bad reviews No shit? Maybe because THEIR business involves the service promise of one million titles. What are the odds that all one million titles are all four stars and above? Meanwhile - check out the eBags site. If you're strong of stomach. Limited selection, and every bag is either above average or unrated. Like a Lake Woebegone for Bags. Not comparable to Amazon, no way no how.
merry christmas, ebags employees and others The shakeout of failed dot-coms is tough on everyone, amusing to some, and a good lesson for us all. Nobody at ebags will "change history" (how does one change history, anyway?), or even make history. But they're mostly decent folks doing the best job they can... and they'll learn from this and go on to real jobs soon enough. The VCs are santa claus for most of them.. they funded a learning experience for a lot of them.. on the job training is much more valuable than anything you learn in school. And no, it doesn't take 100-odd folks to run a luggage-selling web site. as i posted earlier, check out luggage.com. there are exactly two people running that enterprise. but anyway, merry christmas to everyone, and best wishes for 2001. back to the vitriol :)

Fishy Since I've started including web consultancies here (marchfirst, scient, etc) and not just dot-coms, there's been popular demand for a Razorfish fuck... Consultancies don't really count cuz there's nothing inherently wrong with the business model of "pay us money and we'll make you a web site" -- particularly if you're good -- like Razorfish. Still, ya got layoffs, law suits and stuff... For your slanderous enjoyment, here ya go..
Place is going to the dogs 1/4/2001 08:05 PM EST 98 :: fanatastic fun, great work 99 :: more work, still plenty of fun 00 :: work dries up, we party while rome burns 01 :: we go home now Thanks.

I like Mad Dog 20/20 better than Cisco Cisco Systems - Rumor has it Cisco doesn't want the bad press for laying people off -- so instead they've put 5 to 10% of their workforce, mainly sales and installation engineers, on what they call "program." (sounds evil, doesnt it?) The "program" gives each employee 30-days to meet "standards of performance" often higher than 150% last year's targets. If they don't hit the standards, they're forced to resign.
re: how 'bout them layoffs 3/22/2001 07:01 AM EST YOUR FIRED! GET YOUR SHIT AND GET OUT! Security? Show this young person whats behind door number one. Yes...thats the one...the one with the EXIT sign above it. quote: Originally posted by csco_insider: What groups where are getting trimmed? I'm in a group that got a "B+" on profit contribution. What the heck does that mean?

Beenz.com Beans beans good for your heart: Over 180 people (70%) have been laid off or quit Beenz.com in the past few months. Me thinks beenz = throwing away your money.
re: FC supporter 3/29/2001 09:23 AM EST I left beenz to work for an investment house. Philip Letts came in with his new (soon to be fucked) company BarterTrust.com asking for a loan. He gave beenz as a reference so my boss asked me about him. I'll try to get a copy of the rejection letter. NEVER give a company you've fucked as a reference

Fandom.com Fandom.com - Fandumb: After apparently fucking AnotherUniverse.com, lying to their employees all year, and promising in December to give Christmas bonuses in MARCH (which never happened -- but it forced employees to stay put), Fandom.com is done. Lots of ex-employees angry about this one... here are some highlights. "The heartless, dim-witted execs wouldn't know how to run a dot-com if an endless source of cashflow dripped from their assholes." "Hope the company gets as good a treatment in hell as they gave their employees." And finally, "The execs and Satan can fuck each other up the butt for eternity." I'm noticing a theme here....
Incontinentia Buttocks 4/3/2001 06:17 PM EST Quote: Originally posted by Urethra Franklin: And WHAT'S SO FUNNY about Biggus Dickus ? BIGGUS........DICKUS?

Amazon.com Amazon.com - $$$: You need to be a bit of an accountant to get a woody off this one, but this is a classic fucked company move. Raise money through convertible debt (i.e. your debtor can turn the money you owe into stock, so you never really have to pay back the debt with real money, just with your "valuable" stock). Amazon.com raised $1.8 Billion this way. The conversion price for the stock was $70-per-share. With Amazon stock around $9-per-share today, it's not worth the cyber-paper it's cyberly printed on to wipe your cyber butt. So Amazon has to pay back the $1.8 billion in cash...
not first yet again! 4/4/2001 03:36 AM EST hah! all your not first are belong to us! hahahahahahaha
janitor61 4/4/2001 09:48 AM EST AHH but did you think of THIS!? Its easy to see how you guys would be fooled into thinking that amazon.com is doomed. But if you actually take the time to look at it and anaylize the structures at work, its quite simple: First of all the annuity on the indifferential depreciation coincides with the 3.04 Return rate quoted to me by the FCUG, I just got off the phone with them. They also told me, (I knew this was coming), that looking from the Keynesian Macroeconomical vantage, The keogh which alloted these accrued liens were performing a leveraged buy-out, diluting the HRV Tax dividend. Going in anylitically, You can see that the rotational rate of tangency (polar) of the Kernamm-Moler function against Production rates show increased tendencies twoards a hyperfluctual system.... a system that usually bumps the DH Sector breaching along with the FV margin! The Peller function coorelates the the Kernamm-Moler in that the co-vector asergance integral point is TOTALLY dependent upon the equity multiplier, tied up in export declarations and revolving collateral.. This brings the integral and the derivative of the functions and the GFC ratio down to around 40-50, maybe even 53 (i'd be suprised!!) What was most shocking and what you people TOTALLY FORGOT was the ROI manouevers were NOT parallel to the solvency of the discretionary accrual.. They were AGAINST IT!!! AMAZON MUST OF SEEN THAT FROM THE BEGINNING... ACCOUNTING GENIUS!!

eFront.com eFront.com - I'm Batman: Just when you thought they couldn't be any bigger con-artists, fuckedcompany favorite eFront.com stiffed their affiliates once again. The bad news: With just 2 days notice, eFront affiliates will no longer receive the free hosting they were promised, according to this email. The good news: eFront.com seems to be hosed. Call me crazy, but I'd like to take some credit for the good news...
re: YES!!! DEATH to FREE HOSTING 4/5/2001 01:03 AM EST quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by dickwasher: Fucking giving away FREE HOSTING, of all the stupid bonehead ideas of all time. Cut off the free hosting and you cut off the spammers balls! The only thing worse than free hosting is the pieces of shit that use it. sorry, all i can say to this is TRUE, TRUE, TRUE. spammers need to die terrible deaths
re: Bring em down 4/5/2001 06:34 AM EST quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by sweet: Beeeeeee Boooooooooo Efront is sinking like a ship.. People with low standards will inevitably think I'm a boor for pointing this out, but.. This is a poor allegory. The majority of ships are not sinking (they primarily get their usefulness from their buoyancy). Therefore the allegory does ships in general no justice. It'd be much fairer to simply say, "Efront is like a sinking ship." Having said that, you have to feel for all the poor webmasters (essentially the rowers of this particular "ship"), who are chained to the lower decks, unable to escape.

Red Herring Bass (with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads): Rumor has it Red Herring will be taking away all cell phones from reporters in the next month to save dough. Also, apparently around 10% of employees will be laid off as well.
Doctor Evil Throw me a bone here! Are they ill-tempered sea bass?

Rational Software Rations: Rumor has it Rational Software, the company whose cheezy tap-dancers and electronic drummers I watched at the last Internet World here in NYC, will lay off around 10% or 400 employees.
And let's not forget about (Un)ClearCase 4/6/2001 01:14 AM EST Three cheers for Rational's awful code versioning system, ClearCase! It makes Visual Sourcesafe look intuitive, and CVS downright godlike. Who wants a versioning control system that's so complicated, it puts its own special filesystem onto your computer? Whose client machines have to run daemons in order to work? That often destroys the very code it is meant to protect? On one project, they brought in a special guy just to run ClearCase. 3 months, and he never got it set up. But boy, did he bill hours. You can create a whole career around running Clearcase. Then there was the project where they actually DID get it set up. That one was worse. FUCK Rational, I say. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
Harbinger of d00m re: And let Oh, this is too sweet! I actually think it would be a boost for the economy if we could get rid of Clear Case. Some ungodly licensing fee plus the need for a "special" clear case admin... for a shop of a dozen or two programmers? Excuse me I need to go add another 500 users to my CVS tree.
evil_dad re: you are a sorry bunch quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by soft_qe: What a bunch of crybabies! Rational's products are made for REAL developers, not children. Please redirect your energies into learning something about software development. Idiots! Rational Products Suck, I've used them and after lots of therapy I can say there are better things. They're also extremely overpriced. UML is okay but Rational isn't, also the "Unified" process which is a cluster fuck. Booch should have left it alone!!! Besides developer is for film, I'm an Engineer and I use Together!
VOBkiller IRRATIONAL SOFTWARE Absolutely true.... A big brokerage in downtown NYC switched to Rational Clearcase recently and even included management in some cheesy videos touting the positives for this piece of shit software. Several of my fellow colleagues and I soon bolted from the place after our duties transitioned to the "IRRATIONAL" migration from web development. Idiot managers can stick a VOB up their ass for pushing out this overcomplicated piece of shit. I want SourceSafe back!
another fucked lurker I think RATL tools work better than most... just my two bits. I've tried testing tools up the yin-yang, and Robot and Visual Test work much better than Segue or Mercury shit. Purify, Quantify, and Coverage stuff work great for me as well. Clearcase is something I haven't used too much, so I cannot comment. Same dealio with Rose. Overall, I actually like their stuff because I get good results and they make me look good to management. Your mileage may vary. Don't run with scissors. Yada yada yada.
evil_dad re: you are a sorry bunch Agreed, after Rational took them over they went downhill. However, there is something better than NuMega, costs more called Insure++ (www.parasoft.com) I've used Insure++ everywhere and it's the best albeit a bitch to configure. And the sales people suck donkey balls for sure. :-p

BuildNet.com BuildNot: Rumor has it around 170 employees, 2/3 of staff, will be laid off next week from BuildNet.com
BuildThisNOT.com 4/6/2001 10:08 AM EST Hand out the life jackets.... this puppy is going down. Just like the movie Titanic...presented as unsinkable but when you hit the iceburg who gets first placement on the lifeboats.......hmmm

zUniversity.com Zzzzz: zUniversity.com, who partners with universities to produce e-commerce sites, laid off 120 of 140 people. The great thing is, they shitcanned the entire tech staff, so the sites are gonna wither on the vine and die -- my guess -- pretty quickly.
sayonara Site will just run itself... I've heard it called "gerbil mode" -- where you get rid of all the tech staff and the site will just run itself. No problem, programmers aren't changing code, right?!?!? Ha ha ha ha! Cracks me up.
alecto (Registered Sinner) I called this the day . . . I got a spam from these people offering me a "lifetime email address" in some second rate domain name that was Z + "schoolname".com, like anyone would want that. Imagine the cachet and prestige of alumd00d@zmit.com. Not. And the "services" required giving up enough demographics to populate the mark-of-the-beast-database in Brussels. I think not.

Rocket scients Scient: CFO resigned, 675 canned, 175 more to go, many others jumping ship... it's carnage.
re: straight into a wall 4/12/2001 04:06 AM EST My employer hired Scient a bit back to execute on all kinds of pipe dreams they managed to sell to our execs. Despite the pleas from the IT staff about how lamebrained some of the ideas were, they went ahead anyway. After months and months and months of 40 plus consultants (i.e. fresh outta college kids) dragging out "scope analysis" meetings and "analyzing the core competencies" of the company, they give us wut would soon be known as the Scient Fiction document amongst the IT staff..We're talking 7 million plus for a 600 page document with useless use case diagrams, all kinds of buzz words, and best yet, 200 pages of the document was SQL code to build the tables they thought we'd need. Some of the earth shattering conclusions they made (we're a retailer by the way)....e-commerce sites should allow customers to buy things. REALLY!?!?!? So that's what our problem was! A basket system will be needed to facilitate said purchases. HOLY FUCK. Wish I thought'd of that. I wish I were exaggerating. I'm not. Sigh.

Crop failure Greenhouseforstartups.com - Crop failure: "Greenhouse for Startups has been shut down." Good. Pretty pathetic when they can't even sit around and dream up new little FCs...
New Economy Janitor Put it all right in here, junior. This company is NOT going out of business. I don't know where you get your information, but we are NOT, repeat NOT, going out of business. If you bothered to check out our site, you'd see that GreenHouseForStartups.com was only the stealth-mode face on our enterprise. The REAL business is starting up just now, taking all of the properties we've incubated and moving them "OUT" into the mainstream economy. So be sure to visit our Next Step Incubator: OutHouseForStartups.com

Which one you have wanted to receive? Hi, please go away : How toughtful, for the butt-plugs at Taos.com to fire their employees via email... the few who were not (yet) laid off received this pep-rally.
onceadotcommer - Sys Admin Haiku May 01 2001 08:45AM EST billable hours? lawyers aren't as expensive and they're paid to screw
Alpha Gonad - Sys Admin Haiku May 01 2001 09:36AM EST Originally posted by Picky, Picky!: Issue is whether "hours" is one or two syllables. Dictionary.com says one. The difference between "ours" and "hours" is that "ours" is one syllable and "hours" is two. Dictionary.com is wrong. Maybe we should Ask Jeeves. I'm sure the answer is that he won't tell you whether he's gay or not.
is this bullshit - Sys Admin Haiku May 01 2001 10:22AM EST Originally posted by Alpha Gonad: The difference between "ours" and "hours" is that "ours" is one syllable and "hours" is two. Dictionary.com is wrong. Maybe we should Ask Jeeves. I'm sure the answer is that he won't tell you whether he's gay or not OED says one syllable. Back to the drawing board.
onceadotcommer - Dictionary Haiku for the Haiku-Critical May 01 2001 01:25PM This is a haiku for those of you critical of my usage of hours as a two-syllable word: the grammar nazis goosestepping over my right to butcher english OR I'm so sorry that I failed to correctly count the syllables in the last line. OR Webster: only one dictionary.com: two ME: you missed the point

Logical LogicTier - Logical : Following their competitor, LoudCloud, rumor has it LogicTier died today. Lets clone Loudcloud, oh wait that idea sucks too...
onceadotcommer Obla Dee, Obla Da, Life goes on... May 04 2001 08:11AM EST What happen. Someone set up us the bomb. We get signal. What! Main screen turn on. It's you. How are you gentlemen! ALL of your internet infrastructure management are belong to us. You are on the way to descruction. what you say! You have no chance to survive make your time. ha ha ha ha Take off every zig. You know what your doing. move zig for great justice Marc Andreesen sucks ass. So did Netscape, So does Logictier.

Logical Goldman Sachs - Goldman Sucks : No more shitty dot-coms to take public, so the pompous fucks Goldman Sachs cut 150 investment bankers.
Uncle Schnikey You suck May 24 2001 10:32AM EST Who's Pompus? Some Roman guy who worked at Goldman? Oh... you mean POMPOUS - you illiterate fuck. Goldman may be a bunch of tools, but they can spell, you semi-retarded insult to shit spreaders.