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DEN, Boo: R.I.P.
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May 19, 2000 | When a pair of prominent Net companies flame out within days of each other, you can just smell the trend stories cooking in the media oven: Dot-Com Death Rattle! E-Extinction! Net Nada! But just the slightest attention to these companies' sites and products offers a different view. The Net business may or may not be in trouble, but the failures of these companies don't offer much of a weather vane for this industry. Their problems stem not from general market conditions but from some very specific mistakes that more successful Web sites learned to avoid years ago. Scott Rosenberg For instance: In the year 2000, there is no excuse for any professional Web site that expects to reach a wide audience of users to put on its home page an animation that requires a browser plug-in, as DEN has (users who don't have that plug-in get a blank screen.) That choice is simply indicative of the larger miscalculations DEN's creators made, in assuming that the Web is a medium hospitable today to TV-style shows and full-bore audio-visual entertainment. Microsoft spent countless millions launching a network of TV-style shows as part of its MSN strategy back in 1996 and 1997. The resulting disaster left acres of corporate scar tissue that have made Microsoft allergic to a "content strategy" ever since -- and taught anyone within clicking distance the basic lesson that "TV on the Web" is a dumb idea. Who wants to wait for DEN shows like "Aggro Nation" and "Frat Ratz" to trickle down to the desktop, when the kind of entertainment they offer is just a pale imitation of what television delivers more quickly and reliably? But DEN's Hollywood founders thought they knew better; enthralled by the chimera of "convergence," they assumed that because they understood the way the entertainment industry works, they also knew how to entertain people on the Web. That arrogance explains DEN's demise as much as or more than the sexual harassment charges and management shake-ups that are being widely cited in coverage of the company's saga. Similarly, Boo.com built a site that only a (bad) Web designer could love, full of modem-clogging graphics, pop-up windows and other screen detritus. (The current site represents a redesign that is streamlined only in comparison with the original Boo overkill.) The company apparently burned through an astonishing $120 million in six months; perhaps the problem was simply too much money to hire too many designers and engineers with nothing to do but compete at inventing neater ways to slow down their pages.
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