.com post mortem

History:

13/05/01. Updated primary data/charts. May, 2001 is a (sad) projection using linear extrapolation of the first 12 days.

24/02/01. Ok, I was really bored on one weekend after a busy week at a .com, so that I decided to conduct a quick analysis of how are things in the .com land. Analysis is based on number of "fuck ups" posted on a well known board http://www.fuckedcompany.com.

The point of this research was to establish if we hit the bottom as some analysts suggest or not. Since whoever deals with said board are the most interested people in this area, and every single bad piece of news will be reflected there. By looking at those reflections in historical perspective, we might dig something.

To obtain primary data for analysis I wrote a quick Perl script that would retrieve and parse archives specifically looking for the following bits of information:

Date of a reported "fuck"
Company name in question
Points awarded to submitter -- can be used to "weight" severity of failure.
Number of user comments submitted -- if a small company fails then it will have more points, but it has far less reaching consequences than if a big company fails (ie etoys), number of comments will help to see that.

I wasn't bored enough to write PhD on this subject, so I will be brief, here are some charts:

Note: Looks like we peaked in terms of dot com failures in Dec, 00 - Jan, 00. Number of reported failure has gone down somewhat. However, there is sharp acceleration of failures in Apr-May, 2001.

Note: Number of points was calculated by summing all points awarded to any given reports by month. Interesting that we see almost perfect correlation with the chart above. It doesnt mean much, but perhaps it shows that primary data were not that irrelevant afterall.

People seem to whine at about the same level.

Year back at NASDAQ (external image, not hosted here). Interesting to see correlation with falls on the stockmarket and charts above.

My Main Homepage

Some stuff to download:

Perl script to retrieve all data from fuckedcompany.com archives.
Generated tab delimited text file with primary data for analysis (date/company/points/comments)
Microsoft* Excel 97 sheet with imported results, some calculations and some charts.

* - Yes, I do use Microsoft Office. And no, I didn't sell my soul to MSFT, because I didn't get high offer enough.