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A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Should companies be permitted to monitor their employees' Net use? Weigh in on individual vs. corporate rights in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y America Online vs. the "Net nobility" Going once, going twice and growing like crazy Where's the rest of me? Showdown at the HTML corral The little operating system that could - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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BY GREG LINDSAY | The Fortune 500 executive in charge of his company's Web site/intranet/e-commerce operation steps into the conference room and closes the door. At the other end of the table sits the representative from the "interactive services" firm -- which in a former life described itself as a Web design studio. The executive's wish list includes a complete overhaul of the company's existing "brochureware" site, a new intranet for his firm and a secure e-commerce server. When he finishes, he looks at the rep, expecting him to bid on a part of the project and make referrals to software engineering firms for the rest of it. The representative simply looks up, smirks and says, "That'll be $1.2 million. Would you like some fries with that?" OK, so maybe shopping for a Web design firm (sorry, "interactive services firm") isn't this bad yet. But the market seems to be leaning closer to fast food these days than to Spago. This year two mega-firms, Atlanta-based iXL and USWeb in Santa Clara, Calif., have risen to the top of this market by buying out scores of smaller firms. Mark Jacobstein, formerly the CEO of the New York design shop Small World Interactive and now VP of marketing at iXL, describes his USWeb rivals as having "the reputation of being the McDonalds of the Web." (Jacobstein is apparently unaware that his current firm, which bought Small World, has the reputation of being the Burger King.) And corporate America is eating it up. While media companies like Disney et al. are building portals, and while citizens of Geocities happily keep building home pages circa 1995, the third segment of Web sites -- those of the corporate heavy lifters -- are being redefined from glossy Web sites into "networked solutions." Thus the metamorphosis from "Web design" to "interactive services," and thus the shakeout in Silicon Alley and across the industry over the past few months. The days of two guys starting a design firm out of their home office are apparently over; although it didn't do much for Godzilla, in the Internet industry today size apparently does matter. But is bigger really better? And is there any room left for great design? Size is essential to USWeb and iXL -- who, like a certain lizard, have been busy digesting large chunks of the New York scene. iXL gobbled up Micro Interactive on June 1, adding it to a branch created when the company bought Small World in February. USWeb has followed suit, building its own slapdash network of offices to follow the new rules of the Internet industry: Get as big as you can as fast as you can, get tight with Wall Street and then let the IPO sort things out. But there are a number of problems with this strategy that their investors would rather you forget. Besides the possibility of a cookie-cutter look to the Web site of every semisuccessful corporation, iXL and its peers face the problem of melding together a menagerie of small companies with varying cultures and technical expertise, separated by geographical distance, into one big, happy, 600-member family. "The reality is that they're slapping people together to go for an IPO," claims Jeff Dachis, CEO of Razorfish Solutions. "They're saying to themselves, 'Let's roll up people, let's bottom feed and put together a revenue stream and the finance community will welcome us.'" "iXL is running around and picking up whatever 20-person company it can find, but they'll find it's hard to build a brand," added Craig Kanarick, Razorfish's chairman and "chief scientist." N E X T__P A G E .|. Razorfish vs. the Godzillas |
