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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, a couple of articles below this one this headline shows up:

> The Tech Bubble Didn’t Burst This Year. Just Wait (bloomberg.com)

Do others have this strong association with the first internet tech bubble and Aeron chairs? For me there is a strong visual link between the floundering tech companies of that era and the images of the seemingly ubiquitous Aeron chair in the offices being cleared.

Not to belittle the notion of good ergonomics — on the contrary, I love my Steelcase chair and hight adjustable desk — it's just that the brand seems tainted. I wonder if their market research took this into account and came up with a strategy for this association?

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I used to buy cheap used iconic dot-com office furniture at Desk Depot [1] in Mountain View in the 90's (they've been there since '76). That must have been one of the most profitable companies during the dot-com bubble era, and I bet there's furniture that's been recycled through that same warehouse multiple times! The Desk Depot is a Silicon Valley cultural touch-stone, like the Haltek Surplus Electronics [2] [3] or Halted Electronics [4] of office furniture.

[1] http://www.deskdepot.net/

[2] http://www.mv-voice.com/morgue/2000/2000_05_05.haltek05.html

[3] http://www.bluefeathertech.com/technoid/surplusmemorial.html

[4] http://www.halted.com/

That is brilliant.

Totally OT but if you're in the area ever, Halted is a candy store for anyone with even a vague interest in electronics. I recently put together a burning man solar power box from parts there. It would have been cheaper on Amazon but it was great to be able to feel the switches I was looking at and get just the stuff I needed instead of 10 packs from China.

Note that they moved from their longtime location north of Costco and are now one "block" to the East, on Corvin.

I think the giant of used office furniture in the 1990s was Curtis Trading Company ("Surplus Stuff") in Milpitas.

And there's also WeirdStuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale for more weird surplus electronics!

http://www.weirdstuff.com/

>it's just that the brand seems tainted.

Only in the SV and startup echo-bubble. Which is some tens of thousands of people. In contrast, Herman Miller have sold million(s) of them all over the world (Wikipedia has the line "America's best-selling chair").

> Only in the SV and startup echo-bubble.

I'm in neither, but I guess this is just something that stuck to us in the software business in general.

>I'm in neither

Yeah, but you're the type of person who reads HN, so its informationally (is that a word?) close to both :-)

The connotation also spread a little to journalists and media covering the dot-com era, but still nothing that the average Joe would be aware of.

>"Do others have this strong association with the first internet tech bubble and Aeron chairs?"

Yes having to help wind down a company that went bust and looking out on a fancy designed office space devoid of people and a sea of empty Aeron chairs is an indelible image for me.

But along with Aeron chairs I also have visual link with weekly massages, razor scooters in the office, lots of parties, a keg in the kitchen and questionable business plan. Ha ha, this sounds familir : )

Strange - I thought I was the only one who thought the same. I live over on the other side of the world from Silicon Valley, but my recollection of the dot com bubble burst was of seeing tons of these chairs on clearance auctions and looking like lost robots in empty abandoned startup offices. These and foosball tables seem to epitomise the 'startup office fitout' in my mind.

Oh yes, there is a huge association. but for me? It is nostalgia of a pleasant sort. I was a 17 year old kid in 1997, and the next four years were brilliant.

I mean, if you have experience or a good education, now is even better, but a lot of us got our start during the first dot com, and it really was glorious, while it lasted.

I am sure investors have different associations, but for a lot of us it was a very positive experience.

(It is also why I keep predicting another crash. The experience was so formative that I expect much more radical boom and bust cycles than have materialized in this industry since.)

The chairs are popular in many other high-end seating environments, like law offices, high end hotels, etc. In Houston, there's plenty of places you can buy used ones, and occasionally you'll find them with inventory stickers on them: they are coming from big oil and the like, not startups. (Have one I bought full price at home, and a used one at the office)

It always makes me smile to walk into my local public library branch and see the staff sitting in Aerons. I don't know how they got the budget for them, but I'm glad at least some of our public servants can do their work in comfortable, ergonomic, classy chairs that even many private sector companies wouldn't spring for.

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