No more waiting for The Man

Kick TheMan.com out of bed, throw his skanky clothes in the front yard and make yourself an omelet to celebrate. Because selling fuzzy handcuffs -- this was in fact the site's top-selling item -- is not a $100 million business model, even on the Internet. If the short, stupid life of this men's content and commerce site proved anything, it was that even a cover story in Time magazine cannot float a company that hopelessly condescends to its audience, treating millennial men like they are hopelessly clueless Neanderthals. If you never had the pleasure of reading this exercise in ball-scratching -- now the site is just a shell for its laid-off workers' résumés -- try to imagine a magazine for the Maxim man's really dumb younger brother, with a schlock e-commerce spin. TheMan-dot-who? No, we never met the guy.

The continuing consolidation of the online pet retail supply sector

Dog food! Chew toys! Sock-puppet marketing! A revolution in shopping!

Pets.com is gone, and we're wagging our tails with joy. No other site better epitomized the contagion of enthusiastic stupidity that seized the Internet over the last couple of years. The San Francisco company didn't just believe that anything stores could do, Web sites could do better; it actually convinced investors that a business based on delivering 50-pound bags of dog food was sexy, cool, savvy and safe. Forget the sock puppet -- which, let's be honest, was pretty annoying anyway -- Pets.com's greatest asset was its ability to woo investors. Here's a company that persuaded Amazon to buy a 30 percent stake, raised $82.5 million from its February IPO -- and raced toward a final debt tally of over $146 million.

Then, as if such colossal losses weren't enough to justify a good grave-stomping, Pets.com dug itself deeper, announcing that its top 10 executives would receive six-figure bonuses for sticking around to help close the company that they ran into the ground. Do they really need the money? More to the point, do they deserve it? Of course not -- which is why Pets.com is dead, and why we're happy to see it go.

To hear is to obey

One thing made Mylackey different from other dot-coms; it was humble. In fact, it was annoyingly, cutely humble, promoting an army of chipper grunt-workers-for-hire who would do anything from swabbing your kitchen floor to schlepping home your dry-cleaning. The cheeky CEO had the temerity to go by the title "Chief Lackey Officer." Imagine the glowering this cheesy gesture of corporate hip-itude must have elicited among the real lackeys at the company, the drones doing the work. But even a few months ago when the hyper-economy was inflating disposable incomes, there just wasn't a market for an aggregator of personal services, a portal of whistle-while-you-work Seven Dwarfs who will merrily do all your shit work for you. For now, the local bulletin board or community newspaper classifieds will remain the place where we search for servants to pick up after us. And the lackeys are free, free at least from their humiliating job titles as well as their worthless stock options.

Don't panic about this epidemic

Blink and you might have missed Epidemic.com; and if you did, you were lucky. This company rose in the public consciousness last year during the Super Bowl, when it anted up for one of those infamous $3.5 million ads. Epidemic was essentially an overfunded spam company: Epidemic members would agree to include graphic "epiAds" in all the e-mail they sent out to the world, and if their friends clicked on one of those ads, Epidemic would pay them an undisclosed fee.

We cringed at the thought of a flood of e-mail stuffed with graphic ads, of every online acquaintance becoming a potential spammer in hopes of making some extra bucks off us. But fortunately, everyone else apparently thought the idea stank, too: Epidemic went bankrupt this fall.

No boo-hoos for Boo.com

When Boo.com launched, six months late and amid much fanfare, observers scratched their heads in puzzlement. Sure, the site looked cute, and there were some funky clothes for sale, but where had the much-touted $120 million in funding gone? Some Flash animations of rotating shoes and a mascot named Miss Boo who offered coy commentary? And what the hell did that stupid name mean?

The site was slow and the animations frivolous; the clothes weren't cheap and worst of all, the project reeked of hubris. Sure, the European founders of Boo.com knew something about style, but their plans to hawk overpriced street fashion in seven languages and 18 different currencies seemed less than thought out. According to the New York Times, the company spent $42 million on advertising alone, much of which appeared months before the delayed launch; and then there were expenses like the founders' $100,000 apartments in London. The company was clearly more concerned with being hip than being profitable.

So when Boo.com went bankrupt less than six months after launch, few cried. The assets -- including the annoying Miss Boo -- were sold off to Fashionmall.com for less than $2 million, the staff résumés were posted at the post-Web site Web site and Boo.com went down in Net history as a lesson in extravagance. No boo-hoos from our corner.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.