Re: UKNM: So, any techys from BOO like a job?

[Danny O'Brien]

On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 05:35:26PM +0100, Leigh Blue Caldwell wrote:

>

> I wonder how avoidable Boo's problems were.  Something like 2/3 of

> businesses fail in their first two years (this widely quoted statistic

> varies as widely as it is quoted, so don't, er, quote me on it).  Boo

> just happened to have $135m spent on it before it failed.

>

> Someone had to try doing it this way - not being in the first wave of

> Internet businesses, Boo felt it had to spend a fortune to build a

> market presence in time to be in the second wave.  If they hadn't

> failed - or hadn't tried at all - someone else would have tried it.

>

> So I am not too critical of them - in technical, or marketing, or

> operational terms.  It turned out to be a bad strategy - but they might

> just as easily have got lucky.


Couldn't agree more. What really intrigued me all the way through the boo

story was that they were trying very hard - and very smartly - to pursue a

model that no-one else was trying. I actually found it really hard to

condemn

boo out of hand (even when everyone else was gearing up to, and when as

professional curmudgeon, I was practically honour bound to), because

whenever I'd spoken to them, it was clear that they'd plotted out the whole

thing as carefully as anyone else I'd seen.


Except, in their smartness, they'd applied a whole set of novel principles

that I had no way of testing as right or wrong. They seemed to be

consciously

rejecting the previous mode of prior successful Net startups: that of

starting

small, and desperately scaling up as fast as your audience grew. Instead,

they

attempted to create all the instruments of an international brand, ex nihil,

from the first day they launched. Within the logic of that intent, they

*needed* an utterly perfect fulfillment system; they *needed* a presence in

every major market; they *needed* a gigantic media push; they *needed* a

spectacularly innovative Website. With smart enough people, and a hundred

million dollars, that seemed at least attemptable, just this once.


I couldn't decide about boo, because I could see no-one else who was had

done

anything like it. I knew that boo was nothing like Dell or Fedex, for

instance, who achieved their online success by re-engineering their existing

business practices: bolting on a sophisticated fulfillment and inventory

system onto a Web front-end. And while people would talk about boo being the

Amazon of sports gear (or whatever), it seemed obvious that their plans were

*nothing* like Amazons. Amazon spent months barely turning over when it

began,

and then suddenly popped one Christmas, when - as corporate legend has it -

even Bezos had to help out with filling the orders. After that, it was a

race

to match expectations with infrastructure. Boo seemed, instead, to be

attempting something along the level of becoming as complex a corporation as

Fed-Ex overnight.


In the end, I had to try and compare them to Microsoft, who are the only

other

company I've seen try and do this from scratch with MSN.  That didn't bode

well, admittedly, but then, you can never quite reject Microsoft, even when

their current set-up sucked big time.


Microsoft can afford to get these things wrong. It's practically a

given with Microsoft that they burn off money until their third attempt at

anything, when they apply all the lessons of their previous failings in

getting it all, finally and terrifyingly right.


I was curious to see whether boo would do the same. I don't really have an

answer to that: the backers (understandably, maybe) baulked at the burn rate

long before boo had undergone the three or four re-inventions we'd expect

from

MS.


Joel Spolsky's excellent piece on corporate cultures at

http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$113 has something to say

about this too, I think. I don't quite know quite how to incorporate it yet.

But one thing I do know: the boo board weren't dumb fashion victims, and one

of the things they did spent their money on was world class, smart people.

And

rather than keep clear of them, I reckon anyone ex-boo will turn out to have

more experience and a better understanding of how e-commerce works than I

ever

will.


So I'll shut up now.


d.

on the other hand, woooo that UI sucked donkey cocks



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