Only Ten Years Too Early

avc.com

16 points·peter123··6 comments

Which suggests an idea: mine news of failures from 10/20 years ago for ideas that might work now.

Wasn't there a business school professor who was digging up stacks of business plans sent to VCs in the bubble-era to see which ones would have been successful in the web 2.0 era?

It wasn't a business school professor, it was Allen Morgan at Mayfield Fund. Here is the Wired article you're thinking of:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/mayfield.html

This looks like the beginning of the end of your average joe paying for computer hardware to use at home. Apple + awesome design will be able to withstand this trend for a while but the starter Dells / Acers / Toshibas of the world are going the cell phone route (free after rebate a year after launch).

If you believe that their offering was like a netbook, then they were early. OTOH, if you believe that their offering more more like WebTV, then they were quite late.

They were hardly the only ones. I remember a lot of companies at the time pushing cheap low end machines designed around internet access, but none really took off that I can recall.

I imagine that the idea might work better now. For one thing, high speed internet has made web access much more integral to the average user than it was even in 1999. And of course, even a low end computer is actually powerful enough to provide a good user experience for most people. In my experience, that wasn't really true of the offerings in the late 90s.

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