Re: UKNM: So, any techys from BOO like a job?

[Leigh Blue Caldwell]

> The problems with the site have been well documented. What I find 

> really disconcerting is Ernst Malmsten from boo admitting to the FT 

> that they weren't in control of their financial situation. 


How common are shareholder lawsuits in this country?


> Boo.com failed because they rushed to market, going live on a 

> massive scale when they had no majorly exciting products, hadn't 

> tested their site properly, didn't have substantial fulfillment 

> systems in place and got their financial and marketing strategies 

> wrong. In short their entire business plan was seriously flawed.

> 

> Engineering and testing your site is crucial and any developer 

> worth their salt would not agree to deliver an untested site in an 

> unreasonable amount of time without making a client aware of the 

> implications. BUT, if the lunatics have taken over the asylum in the 

> finance department, is there a case that the techies are the 

> scapegoats for what was actually a failed business strategy? 

> I fear that many businesses who have let impatience override sound 

> business judgement may go the same way as boo.



I wonder how avoidable Boo's problems were.  Something like 2/3 of

businesses fail in their first two years (this widely quoted statistic

varies as widely as it is quoted, so don't, er, quote me on it).  Boo

just happened to have $135m spent on it before it failed.


Someone had to try doing it this way - not being in the first wave of

Internet businesses, Boo felt it had to spend a fortune to build a

market presence in time to be in the second wave.  If they hadn't

failed - or hadn't tried at all - someone else would have tried it.


So I am not too critical of them - in technical, or marketing, or

operational terms.  It turned out to be a bad strategy - but they might

just as easily have got lucky.  I'm sure we would all have done things

a bit differently - and maybe some of us would have done enough things

differently to have got it right.  As an 'ex-employee' [presumably

that's all of them] said today in the FT, "It is all very well to say

what was going wrong at Boo, but a lot went right."


It's immensely hard to put together a business of that size from

scratch in well under a year, and it may be that it's simply

impossible.  But as the economic environment starts to move faster and

faster, people were inevitably going to try it - and no matter how

good the execution, it is pretty likely that a high proportion of them

were guaranteed to fail.


> Anyway, if any techie from boo.com with good asp skills is out there, 

> Snow Valley can offer you a good home. 

> 

> >Sorry about being so un-subtle, but with the shortage of

> >good techys anything is worth a punt.



Since Andrew asked for the perl programmers and Sarah's bagged the ASP

people, I'll have the server-side Java folks.


Any takers for their Flash designers?


> I do however feel very sorry for the 300 employees who fell victim.


As you can see, they will have immense trouble finding another job.


	Leigh.

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  information        |  Leigh Caldwell, managing director, Internation.

    innovation       | St. George's House, 44 Hatton Garden, London, U.K.

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