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> This is the weirdest technology market that I’ve seen. You must have not lived through the dot com boom. There was almost everything under the sun was being
by zikduruqe 11mo ago
> This is the weirdest technology market that I’ve seen.
You must have not lived through the dot com boom. There was almost everything under the sun was being sold under a website that started with an "e". ePets, ePlants, eStamps, eUnderwear, eStocks, eCards, eInvites.....
- cheevly 11mo agoThese are not the same.
- dolphinscorpion 11mo agoYeah, this time is different. Really
- zikduruqe 11mo agoHistory doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
- ricardobeat 11mo agoIt's funny that the Netherlands seems to still live in the dotcom boom to this day. Want to adopt a pet? verhuisdieren.nl. Want to buy wall art? wall-art.nl. Need cat5 cable? kabelshop.nl. 8/10 times there is a (legit) online store for whatever you need, to the point where one of the local e-commerce giants (Coolblue) buys this type of domain and aliases them to their main site.
- thrance 11mo agoPretty funny, looks like it works in France too! animaux.fr redirects to a pet adoption service, cable.fr looks like a cable-selling shop. artmural.fr exists but looks like a personal blog from a wall artist, rather than a shop.
- KPGv2 11mo agoThis is still the case in the US, too. I don't know why people are talking like it stopped happening. amazon.com, amazon.com, amazon.com, amazon.com All these things are still e-tail here, too. We didn't go back to B&M.
- ricardobeat 11mo agoI was making commentary about the niche/independent nature of these online retailers (another example: graszaaddirect.nl, specialized in grass seeds), not that e-commerce itself survived the bubble. Having a dense country where you reach any opposite end in <3 hours is probably a major factor. You don't really care where it's coming from (sometimes it's Germany) as delivery time is the same. That would not be the case for the US, you'd require a web of distributors.
- nailer 11mo agoIt did make sense though. ePlants could have cornered the online nursery market. That is a valuable market. I think people were just too early. Payment and logistics hasn’t been figured out yet.
- baggachipz 11mo agoThe Pets.ai Super Bowl commercial will trigger the burst.
- staticman2 11mo agoThat was certainly a bubble but I don't think pets.com was doing a research experiment. From what I recall there were some biotech stocks in that era that do fit the bill.
- aswanson 11mo agoEven hardware. eMachines.
- bookofjoe 11mo agoflooz
- jfengel 11mo agoThose things all worked, and all of those products still exist in one form or another. It was a business question of who would provide it, not a technology question.
- antonvs 11mo agoNone of those were science experiments or research projects in any way.