Ctrl-Alt-Frank
'Vulture Culture' hurts tech-industry image
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) - by Frank Catalano
While everyone's been on the lookout for technology's post-Internet Next Big Thing, a whole small industry has sprung up. The past 18 months have seen this nascent industry develop Web sites, networking events, and newsletters, and draws on the experiences of a broad array of technology professionals.
It even has its own jargon. You may be familiar with some of it: Dot gone, dot bomb, and dot doomed.
The cottage industry is the Vulture Culture, a subculture that's risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the Internet boom - only to feed like a vulture on its carcass.
This scavenger got its start in April 2000, when dot-com stocks on the Nasdaq collapsed. And it spread like the shapeless Blob of a bad 1950s science fiction movie, possibly to the detriment of the public's view of the tech sector.
The most visible efforts were Web sites and newsletters. While traditional media reported Internet layoffs and failures alongside other business news, entire sites and e-mail newsletters sprang up to do nothing but dish the doom ... and sometimes spread more gloom through unsubstantiated rumors.
The sites ran the gamut, from the gleefully obscene F***edCompany.com, to the sober and more journalistic DotComScoop.com, to the opportunistic DotComDoom.com, which billed itself as "the largest portal on the downturn, demise and doom of dotcoms."
For those who wished to participate rather than merely observe, DotDoomed
.com let visitors rate randomly-selected Internet companies on a five-point scale from "dotCool" to "dotDoomed" and then tallied up the results for all to see.
PinkSlipParty.com was launched to institutionalize the pink slip party - of the kind laid off dot-commers held in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere - to hook up job seekers with those few still hiring. Lessons learned from the collapse could be traded by serial entrepreneurs on StartUpFailures.com.
Of course, physical pink slip parties were held by Seattle Network and others. Outplacement firms saw increased business. In addition to the human assets, there were physical assets, such as the once-ubiquitous Foosball tables, available on sites like Liquidation.com and from real-world auction houses.
The intellectual assets, like domain names and software code, were listed for bid on domain registrar and intellectual property sites.
And what of the tchotchkes, free-flowing at press events, trade shows and launch parties? EBay still has a wide selection of Pets.com sock puppets and dot-com logo mugs for sale, not to mention the occasional Egghead.com stock certificate.
Some in the industry praised the Vulture Culture, saying it provided a cathartic outlet for grieving 22-year-olds who just lost their $70,000-a-year first job. The outlets, defenders claimed, let those in the industry vent and kept workers motivated.
And the culture, admittedly, is self-limiting. There's only so much carcass to pick at; the beasts are no longer dying in droves. The pace of layoffs and failures appeared to have bottomed out in August, though extinctions likely will continue at a slow rate for months.
These slimmer pickings have already grounded some of the Vulture Culture's high fliers. Several intellectual property auction sites are gone and pink slip parties are more rare. DotDoomed's site now illiterately states, "The devolupers have choosen to drop the praject and go too werk with various web compinies (Webvun and Pets.com being the choosen compinies)."
Even the aforementioned unprintable rumor site has established a sibling good industry news site, LuckedCompany.com. DotComScoop.com has moved into reporting on broader layoff and economic trend news.
Though some of the vultures have landed, their effect on the public's perception of the tech industry may be longer lasting. From the outside looking in, it appears the only real activity in the tech industry for the past year and a half has been that of failure.
To the nonsavvy observer, this preoccupation with bad news damages the industry's reputation. Such damage may be slow to repair and has already spread from dot-coms to chatter about the hardware, software, networking and wireless tech sectors.
Grieving is good. Wallowing is not. While such observations of the once-mighty falling are fun as a guilty pleasure, the doom business is bad business, long term. Its very public nature could give potential investors and customers the impression that technology's Vulture Culture is its only surviving culture.
Frank Catalano runs a marketing consultancy for technology companies, provides tech industry commentary for KCPQ-TV Seattle, and co-wrote "Internet Marketing for Dummies." He admits to having taken dot-gone tips at catalano@catalanoconsulting.com.
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