Bubble Signs: When Previous Failures Were Really Just Proof Of Future Viability

Ramblings

from the here-we-go-again dept

Back in January, we mentioned the supposed relaunch of Boo.com as another sign of the burgeoning Bubble 2.0. The signs have continued to grow over the last year, with plenty of other ideas getting rehashed, and not looking any better the second time around. Now, talk of a Boo relaunch is going around again, based on some comments by a Swedish market researcher. But it doesn’t really sound like the guy has any inside info, he’d just seen the previous stories and the claim on the boo.com site that it would be relaunched in 2006. Instead, he was using Boo as an example of how “Swedish e-commerce now is starting to matter”, since the company was founded by three Swedes, and that “in this second e-boom the concepts are a lot more mature and successful” — claims even more bizarre than a Boo relaunch. The “concept” of selling clothes on the internet has been proven by plenty of companies, stretching back to the first bubble, but the concept of a poor business model — of which Boo was a champion — will remain unsuccessful, no matter how mature it is. Somehow, the idea that one of the most spectacular failures of the web bubble now represents some kind of success seems like little more than another sign that web history is fixing to repeat itself.