The New, New Economy
What the hell happened to e-commerce?
Remember the New Ecomony? The dot-com boom? Everything internet? Well it’s gone, and the new, new economy is here. And it’s going to be tough on us couch potatoes.
Remember the good old days of the internet boom? Last year? Let’s say you were shopping for an electronic whatsit. You could visit a number of opinion sites to get an idea of the quality of the whatsit you were looking for. You could visit a comparison shopping site to get whatsit quotes from 36 different vendors. You could hit 15 different auction sites to check out the used whatsit market. There was probably even a whatsitwatch.com for you to get the latest whatsit news. You could then pick the vendor of your choice, order the whatsit, and have it at your door within two days.
Now you’re lucky to find an electronic whatsit for sale, period.
This is a real complaint. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been searching for a laptop. Whenever I googled for someone to sell me a laptop, I ran into the same two things, over and over:
- All gone. Domain owned by a porn site, or
- Purchased by direct competitor.
So after many hours of searching, and many unclosable pop-up windows later (Is that even possible? With a stapler? Yecch.), I found two. Yep, count’em: two sites. In both cases? Server errors. No kidding. Sorry, can’t sell you anything. There’s a syntax error in our shopping cart script.
With the big boom over, there’s actually quite a few good web developers out there. These companies might consider hiring one or two.
To add to the irony of my new, new economy experience, while I was doing my purchase research, I received six—count’em six—pieces of SPAM telling me all about the great new top-level domains that will be available next month.
New top-level domains, eh? Great idea. Except we really don’t even need the ones we’ve got now. Last time I did the math, we were only twelve mergers away from AOL/Time Warner owning the entire Internet. What will the URL be, I wonder. http://www.com?
But that’s a rant for another day.
The new, new economy, is like the old economy, but now you’re not allowed to make anything useful out of the internet.
I’m going to go drive to the computer store now.
kj · PDDXIII
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