Dot-Gones

God, do you remember that time? It was around 1999. All around me, it seemed the world was going mad. Microsoft was in some monopoly suit. Dot Coms were sprouting like mushrooms. A good friend of mine came to me and asked me to design a business plan for his mother's idea for a website, notjustthekitchen.com. It was going to be a site for busy Canadian women, a la Chatelaine -- some site with weekly advice columns blah blah blah.

He provided me with these figures that showed how much the company had as funding money, and a report from Deloitte & Touche, or whatever the hell they are. In this report he said that they had millions in funding and potential funding. I knew that was a total crock of shit. He didn't even have enough money to pay for the printing of the business plan -- we had two dummy copies printed (I kept one) and as far as I know that's where the whole thing ended.

I mean, just the name was ridiculous, but I couldn't tell him that. He was just riding the dotcom wave, like everyone else.

I remember going to a trendy restaurant in San Francisco called Flying Saucer (it might still be there). All around me, and I mean at EVERY TABLE, were these young dudes in the dotcom uniform of the time: a navy blue cotton shirt opened at the collar, and probably jeans. You could just smell the dotcomness in the room, it was so thick.

I was blown away at some of the things I was reading. I remember I kept thinking: how on God's earth can this company make any money (pick a company -- any company. They were all around and they all had.com at the end of their names)? It was like a giant Pet Rock craze gone mad.

I wanted in. I asked my broker (I had a broker!!!! Me! I had a broker! And an accountant!!!) to buy tech stocks. I had no idea what that meant, but he wisely talked me out of any such idiocy. The only thing I regret I didn't buy was Apple, but at the time the grave was five feet deep and Apple was all but embalmed.

And now, look . . . look at the graveyard strewn with the rubble of hundreds of thousands of dot-gones . . . pets.com, webvan.com, the list goes on and on. Free deliveries of groceries to your home, and the driver even puts them away for you? How can that company make any money? HOW?

Well, there's one dot-gone that's already six feet under and you don't need a time machine to know who that is. Facebook is going to be the subject of one of my blog posts in ten years or so with the title: Remember Facebook? It's lying next to MySpace and Friendster in that grave over there . . .