[daniel1980fl2]

They ditched a perfectly working MySQL application and migrated to Oracle which caused them to hire Oracle consultants $2000 per day and spend millions on Oracle big-iron. They were hiring out of control. They decided to build a new building to house their new offices because the Ocean Park Blvd offices in Santa Monica weren't pretty enough. They opened up a London office in Piccadilly Circus, the most expensive rental area in London. They replicated their entire USA dev team in the UK for no apparent reason. They started work on a German operation. They launched a warehouse in Belgium (my baby) to service Europe. All execs flew first class between Europe and USA. Engineers were flown around the world as needed. I was even told to expense my groceries while in Santa Monica for 3 months. Trivial, but the little things add up.

--- none of above would have happened, had they hired professional managers, not a bunch of children willing to spend every single dime on anything other than business itself.

apply that list to any business, including apple, google, microsoft, oracle, groupon, you name it, the result would be the same disaster as with etoys.

[arethuza]

In some .com disasters it was actually the "professional managers" who caused a lot of the problems as they were the ones who tried to replicate the infrastructure, pay and perks of the large companies they had worked for before.

[daniel1980fl2]

how can "professional manager" burn so much money without any profits, knowing that spending this money will not affect the business (positively) -- is really building your own offices because you seen five premises and dont like the view from windows will sell more toys online??

[jerf]

It was a heady time. Success was so inevitable that you could just function on the assumption that you were going to succeed, so you better be ready for it. It was just about to start raining money, the winners would be the ones with the largest buckets, and you better invest in that bucket! Unfortunately what actually rained down turned out to be fire from the heavens, but, well, you know how the story went after that.

[veritgo]

Professional Manager does not necessarily mean Competent Manager.