Talk:Boo.com

Untitled

Query to author of this article. The sentence, "One contractor alone was reputed to be earning over £100 an hour—and Boo.com had asked them to put off holidays by offering 5-Star hotels and first class flights," is confusing. See below.

"One contractor alone was reputed to be earning over £100 an hour" -- not meaningful without context. what's your point? that this person was overpaid? on what do you base that assessment? many programmers, designers, others earn as much. what does one overcompensated contractor have to do with the story as a whole. also, how do you know this? some aspects of the article read like it was written by a disgruntled or dismissed former employee -- lots of insider details and intense criticisms of the executives.

"Boo.com had asked them to put off holidays" -- who is 'them'? the overpaid individual above? or the entire staff? do you mean that employees were asked to delay taking a holiday in order to work? this in and of itself is neither surprising nor unusual in the high-tech world. what does it have to do with the preceding and next thoughts? what does it have to do with the story of Boo.com overall?

"by offering 5-Star hotels and first class flights" -- not clear. who was offering what to whom and why? do you mean that the company offered to reward employees who delayed their vacations by giving them perks such as these? what's wrong with that (other than the fact that it is one of the ways the executives blew through their millions in venture capital).

Suggest you break it into two (three) separate thoughts and rewrite. 24.211.216.146 00:32, 14 September 2007 (UTC)simonlefranc@hotmail.com

Removed a bunch of crap

I'm assuming someone got bored and stuck a load of junk on the page. Reverted, 18/06/08, henry [with a mailbox on] preloaded.com

Was this rewrite necessary?

Someone rewrote the introduction to this article, which I have pasted below:

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On May 18, 2000, the BBC reported that Boo.com had gone bankrupt. Good riddance. Boo was one of the very few high-profile sites to launch in recent months that dared violate my design principles and aim for glitz rather than usability.

Contrary to some analysts, I don't think that Boo will drag other e-commerce sites down with it. The collapse of Boo does not prove that e-commerce doesn't work. It proves that overly fancy design doesn't work. I do agree that the story ought to teach investors some lessons about reading the business plan. They need to check two things:

Is the site aiming at simplicity or complexity? Does it follow or violate the guidelines for usable sites? Does the site have a credible usability strategy using approved methodology or will it be relying on "voodoo usability" methods? If these two issues are not spelled out in the business plan (or if the answers are the wrong ones), you will most likely be wasting your investment. Users just don't want to take it anymore. Mini-Review of Boo Written December 1999

Boo.com takes itself too seriously. Instead of making it easy to shop, the site insists on getting in your face with a clumsy interface. It's as if the site is more intent on making you notice the design than on selling products. Boo should be congratulated, though, on running a site that supports 18 countries equally well in terms of both language and shipping. Screen pollution: Boo insists launching several of its own windows. My own browser window is left with the message "Nothing happens on this page-except that you may want to bookmark it." Fat chance, especially since the windows forced upon me are frozen and can't be adapted to my window or font preferences. This site is simply slow and unpleasant. All product information is squeezed into a tiny window, with only about one square inch allocated to the product description. Since most products require more text than will fit in this hole, Boo requires the user to use a set of non-standard scroll widgets to expose the rest of the text, 20 words at a time. Getting to a product requires precise manipulation of hierarchical menus followed by pointing to minuscule icons and horizontal scrolling. Not nice. Miss Boo, the shopping assistant: She is prettier than Microsoft's Bob but just as annoying. Web sites do need personality, but in the form of real humans with real opinions and real advice. I prefer the interactive content experiments in the site's magazine section, such as a feature on the similarities between stone-age living and some current fashion products. What's a boobag? It's a shopping cart, actually, and unlike other carts it contains miniature photos of your products. It is also possible to drape the items on a mannequin to see how they look as an outfit, though too much dragging and low-level interface manipulation is required.

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I have reverted this as, IMHO, it seems to run against WP:POV. Please feel free to reinsert this if I have misinterpreted this. Andrew (My talk) 12:06, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

It might be worthwhile re-instating this _if_ it's a verifiable comment at the time from a notable reviewer (and thus relevant for boos' reception more than NPOV comment on boo itself). It would need proper cittion though. It's certainly not suitable as a general introduction. Otherwise leave it out.

Yes, thought so - it's the contemporary Jakob Nielsen review that's already linked. Delete it, or else improve the citation to make it clearer what he thought, but certainly don't reproduce it verbatim and uncredited.

Andy Dingley 12:34, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your help. I'll leave this out for now. The text is saved here if anyone ever wants to clean the passage up by adding references and taking out POV statements. Andrew (My talk) 15:54, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure they didn't rewrite the second section as well? It's written like a breezy magazine article with no references to back up the very point-of-view comments about "sexiness" and "usability". The article may be correct, but it's not supported by references. --NellieBly (talk) 19:34, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

The amount of money burned

A variety of figures have been reported in the press ranging from $120 million to $188 million. I believe that the most reliable figure is $135 million as quoted in the book boo hoo, because there are precise details quoted of who invested how much and when.Rhanbury (talk) 18:41, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Weblink

Updated a Weblink to Cnet. --217.150.152.145 (talk) 12:02, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Sources

• Glasner, Joanna. "Boohoo Tells a Dot-Com Disaster." Wired.
• Johnson, Bobbie. "Boo Who? Europe's Biggest Dot-Com Casualty Is Back." BusinessWeek. 12 April 2011.

In addition h2g2 has an entry WhisperToMe (talk) 02:25, 13 March 2012 (UTC)