So corporate coruption is nothing new, but the fact of investing is that most investments / companies / ideas are failures. Like humans companies have life spans and 20 years after AT&T split up they were bought by one of their spin offs.

If most investments fall below the average then how is making a social security program which has people play the market safer or better than what exists now?

Right now it seems as though the web is -at least to me- as important to the economy as railroads and automobiles were.

As large as the original visions of the web were they were likely only a fraction of what will come. They of course were out of reason as exuberence caused people to buy things that would never have a chance at success. The idealisms of the channels actually stifeled the ideas that were needed to make the network work to its full potential.

The one thing that makes the web so powerful is the hidden demand within each of our minds. We can search and then find a little info and then find more about our interests and then go after them.

Of course with that implied demand there is also a ton of ad demand.

Back in 99 - when I knew absolutely nothing about the web and was completely naive to the world around me- I still understood that the ability to target that demand was going to make advertising huge. The problem was that I did not appreciate just how crap most of the targeting mechanisms were. They were suckers investments. DCLK was a standard must own web marketing stock. Today they are worth less than a billion.

While I was pretty damn poor I found ways to live absurdely meager to buy a bunch of stocks that all went to shit. The exuberence at the time meant that people created arbitrary metrics to justify taking the average person for a ride.

Amazon provides a great service. I buy there frequently. Still need to read about 100 books I have bought.

Today I just installed Quickbooks on a new computer. I told my friend about getting the new computer and Quickbooks and he told me their manual was shit and that I should buy a book. I checked my email and Amazon recommended one.

Despite the fact that they were creating an amazing brand and they have powerful recommendation engines they still have not created a ton of value. To date they have lost about 3 billion dollars and are only worth about 15.

While recommending related products and great customer service are great, the best item to sell is no item at all. Google came years later is worth far more. In the first 11 months of 2004 I think Google spent about $2.5 on marketing. In the last quarter they had about a billion dollars in ad sales and are stupid profitable.

Just today DoubleClick put out another marketing report, but this one about the effects of search engines.

Right now there are only 4 companies that control most of those railways though, and obviously DoubleClick is not one of them.

• The smallest of the players (ask jeeves) is making acquisitions and now has even decided to run ads on television
  
• MSN just joined the market and is going to be spending 9 figures advertising the new service
  
• Google seems to be rolling out technologies that prevent websites for even ranking for their own names. obviously that brews bad karma and a bad user experience. There also is heavy insider selling.
  
• Yahoo! seems to be more in tune with the subscription business model (like RSS)

I wonder which ones are suckers bets and which ones will pan out, or if due to concepts like sell side advertising they may all become outdated fools gold.