September - 2001 - issue > Cover Feature

Spend a day trawling through brand-name VC portfolios, and visit the corporate Web sites of a few hundred of the most promising startups out there. What you see will open your eyes, but probably not quite in the way the marketers who put together the sites might have wished.

Determining this year’s si100 meant days spent in front of a computer visiting companies on the Web. Though fascinating, the experience is a mental marathon, and it shouldn’t have to be quite as grueling.

Corporate Web sites are a hotbed of useless generalities. If you can get past the elaborate flash presentations (virtually mandatory for startup websites these days) to click on the elusive “skip intro” link, what greets you is a fairly consistent formula. If you visit enough companies, you can find your way around just about any site in seconds…up to a point.
But after visits to a dozen sites, the reality begins to set in. So much sounds the same: “e-business,” “broadband,” “real-time,” etc. It all starts to turn into a massive morass of new economy buzzwords. Dot-coms crashed ages ago, but things in this regard haven’t changed. Distinct companies blend into each other more and more. Some sites seem purposely designed to bar you from knowing a company’s dirty secrets — like, for example, that they don’t have customers, they have a shaky business model, and nobody understands their value proposition.

A company could “remove the last bottleneck to optical network service revenues,” “deliver standards-based data, telephony, and video over last mile networks,” “leverage your existing network infrastructure to quickly create and deliver a virtually unlimited range of value-added services,” “eliminate friction at the network edge,” or even create “a new generation of networking solutions for the delivery of high-bandwidth metro services,” and though each business model is obviously distinct, the constant occurrence of the same words and concepts is worrying.

The e-business enterprise software crowd (or their PR people maybe) are the guiltiest practitioners of vague language. In no other industry can you be quite so sure that someone marketing a company has virtually no idea what he or she is talking about.

So many unanswered questions arise: What is the “fully integrated, real-time economy?” Explain the nature of “operational assets in your company’s fixed asset portfolio.” Why do I need to manage my “business systems?” What are my “business systems” exactly? When you say “e-business profitability,” what do you really mean? Is my business an e-business? Will I be profitable?

In all seriousness, an afternoon spent on a tour of the wonderful world of corporate Web sites leaves an important impression. We are in a grave state of technology over-supply that runs perhaps even deeper than people choose to realize, and which hasn’t been eliminated by the “technology downturn.” How many solutions will one CIO or major telecom carrier implement? How many software firms can i2 or Microsoft acquire? Though new startups with great technology arise all the time, the noise from unlimited competition in the market is so deafening that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Determining this year’s si100 meant putting aside hundreds of companies simply because we didn’t feel confident that anyone holding corporate purse strings would really take the time to give so many incremental and point solutions — however brilliant — a thorough examination.

Marketing is a fact of life. We don’t suggest that companies fire their marketing people and come out with Web sites that say simply, “We build a networking box that’s 30 percent faster and more scalable than Cisco’s;” or, “We design software that will let you keep track of your suppliers.” But the wealth of nebulous claims, unclear business descriptions, and corporate jargon reveals if anything the dire straits so many young companies are experiencing as they try to validate their positions in the market. Many of them have realized that their “dependable enterprise solution that measurably reduces the time, complexity and cost of deploying and managing business systems” is not going to get the traction it needs.
We are tempted only to say, Out with the bull$#@*!, welcome back to the real world.

Note: All quotes taken directly from the Web sites of companies founded and managed by Indians in the U.S.