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A year ago, Thomas Friedman wrote a breathless New York Times op-ed column titled "Amazon.you," in which he declared that Amazon.com was doomed because anyone and his garage could compete with the e-commerce juggernaut. As evidence, Friedman trotted out one Lyle Bowlin, whose Positively-You.com bookstore -- run out of a spare bedroom in his Cedar Falls, Iowa, home -- seemed to be doing just that. A couple weeks later, Friedman wrote a follow-up column, "Killing Goliath.com": Bowlin's business was going gangbusters not coincidentally thanks to the choice coverage in the New York Times, which placed Bowlin in the media food chain and led to other free publicity for his enterprise.

As I and other pundits observed at the time, Friedman's enthusiastic broadsides showed a remarkable ignorance about the way the Web business works. They ignored the toughest problem all Web merchants face: attracting customers. If you have New York Times columnists doing your marketing for you free, of course you can jump-start a business nicely. But when the free press coverage dies down, what happens? Goliath prospers; David needs to find lots of capital or accept that he will remain a garage operation.

Bowlin's business, unsurprisingly, went under. But you will look in vain for that story in the Times. It's told Thursday in the paper's arch-competitor, the Wall Street Journal.

POSTCRIPT, March 3

After I wrote this, Friedman did indeed publish a column, "Saga of an Online Pioneer," as a kind of post mortem to the Bowlin story. It's unclear exactly how Bowlin was a "pioneer," given the hundreds of thousands of small e-commerce enterprises that preceded his. More importantly, although the article chronicles "lessons learned" from the affair, Friedman continues to sidestep his own central role in this story: He makes only one small reference to having "helped midwife" Bowlin's saga. Bowlin, at least, acknowledges that "free advertising from news stories" was central to his tale -- but the New York Times columnist doesn't seem to understand, or doesn't want to admit, that this phrase points right at him.
salon.com | March 3, 2000

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