
Only Ten Years Too Early - peter123
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/only-ten-years-too-early.html
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davidw
Which suggests an idea: mine news of failures from 10/20 years ago for ideas
that might work now.

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peter123
Wasn't there a business school professor who was digging up stacks of business
plans sent to VCs in the bubble-era to see which ones would have been
successful in the web 2.0 era?

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Alex3917
It wasn't a business school professor, it was Allen Morgan at Mayfield Fund.
Here is the Wired article you're thinking of:

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/mayfield.html>

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ajju
This looks like the beginning of the end of your average joe paying for
computer hardware to use at home. Apple + awesome design will be able to
withstand this trend for a while but the starter Dells / Acers / Toshibas of
the world are going the cell phone route (free after rebate a year after
launch).

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softbuilder
If you believe that their offering was like a netbook, then they were early.
OTOH, if you believe that their offering more more like WebTV, then they were
quite late.

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ricree
They were hardly the only ones. I remember a lot of companies at the time
pushing cheap low end machines designed around internet access, but none
really took off that I can recall.

I imagine that the idea might work better now. For one thing, high speed
internet has made web access much more integral to the average user than it
was even in 1999. And of course, even a low end computer is actually powerful
enough to provide a good user experience for most people. In my experience,
that wasn't really true of the offerings in the late 90s.

