Why the Boo.comeback makes sense
accountant, AJAX, amazon, Boo So, Boo.com, Broadband, CBS Marketwatch, content management system, Denmark, DHTML, digital media, Dot-com, DSL, e - commerce, e-commerce operation, e-commerce sites, e-commerce software, eBay, electronic data infrastructure, Europe, European Union, Flash, Forward So, G8, head, hotshot web designer, Humanities, I can think, Information Age, internet commerce, internet ecommerce, online clothing manufacturers, online store, prime real estate, real estate, Reuters, sales assistant, software packages, tax systems, United Kingdom, United States, UPS, using Flash, Web 2.0, web service, web services, World Wide Web, XML, Yahoo, YouTube
There has been much discussion lately, most of it negative (you can read more comments on Technorati), about the comeback of boo.com and once again, I find myself on the opposite side of the shared wisdom. Before I go into reasons as to why I think a comeback by Boo.com (a boo.comeback?) makes sense, let me first go into my unique qualifications to make such an assessment: I happen to have worked at Boo.com in the past and I was the insider who exposed some of the challenges the company had faced. I spent a fair amount of my time, in 2000 and 2001, talking at conferences about the lessons learned from this failure and I think that some of those are now fixed. Looking Back In the ensuing 6 years, I’ve been going over and over what went wrong and discovered more lessons along the way: the market conditions were wrong, we were young and arrogant, and, for the most part, we didn’t really understand the magnitude of what we were trying to accomplish: to remind people, our goal was to launch a website in 16 countries (15 EU countries + the US) on day one, localizing our site for…