Month: November 2000

“B-to-c is not dead at all, it’s just changed. We think the worst is over.”

Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker, on the slow recovery of her investment bank’s ability to reap outrageous stock-offering fees from Internet companies that sell to consumers, Upside.com, 9 November 2000

“Once [Pets.com] stopped burning their cash, they discovered that they needed more cash.”

Sanford Bernstein analyst Faye Landes, on the economics-as-pyrotechnics that doomed a kitty-litter-shipping, sock-puppet-advertising, $10-off-everything-forever dot-com disaster, The New York Times, 8 November 2000

“Under our old consumer model, we were too good at getting you the information and getting out of the way to succeed at monetization. That’s what people loved about us.”

Eric Tilenius, CEO of the freshly renamed Atomica, on plans for the company formerly known as GuruNet to make money by getting people to pay to have it stay out of their way, News.com, 7 November 2000

“Nobody knows the new businesses that will come from the Internet. We just want to put people together and give them resources.”

Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, extolling the virtues of a merger that promises more great new innovations like the shutdown of Gnutella, an “unauthorized freelance project” of AOL subsidiary Nullsoft that promised to have negative synergies with Warner Music, ZDNN, 6 November 2000

“I mean, do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day? There’s no electricity in that house. None…. They’re not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something.”

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, on whom it’s slowly dawned that computers are not going to cure world hunger, The New York Times, 3 November 2000