Also see https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-... — from 2000 but still relevant here.
I did notice something new... Wondering if anyone can shed light on this?
> If you’re going into a market with no existing competition, lock-in, and network effects, you better use the Amazon model, or you’re going the way of Wordsworth.com, which started two years before Amazon, and nobody’s ever heard of them.
Then he links a reply from the Wordsworth founder, which was kinda heartwarming:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/07/wordsworth-respond...
but below that, Joel posts his own reply to that email, which reads as incredibly condescending and mean-spirited to me? does he use this tone with others, is it just bro talk?
> [several paragraphs complaining about independent bookstores] > Anyway, that’s my bookstore rant It’s great to hear from you, and I suspect a lot more people will hear of Wordsworth if Amazon runs out of money as quickly as some analysts think they will!
Even weirder to create a story around some sort of selfless ice-cream evangelical, and explain in the beginning how he had no particular interest in ice cream, and was just unemployed and wealthy, looking for a arbitrary business to start that might be successful in the area.
His idea of total success would have been the brand just becoming another big franchise and/or label on store freezer shelves. Instead of doing it himself, he sold a big piece to someone who they would do it, but failed because he was all mouth. I'm not buying it as a tragedy.
edit: note, I'm talking about Steinberg, because the person who started the shop disappears pretty quickly in the narrative.
I understand the journalist tried to get comment from them and it's not their fault they couldn't, but ultimately the story is unsatisfying because the picture is so incomplete.
It's a very confusing mix of what sounds like neglectful incompetent management followed by overexpansion, control fraud, stock-pumping through affinity fraud, and possibly naked embezzlement/theft at the end.
Fraud? Hubris? Too much leverage? Pandemic? Pathological mismanagement? No idea what actually caused the failure.
