12 Flame-Outs in 2001

Out of Favor. Public e-marketplaces, predicted to change the way companies do business, were hit hard by the economic downturn after implementation costs soared and expected ROI failed to materialize.

Privacy Pause. Backing away from his predecessor's position on more online privacy legislation, Timothy Muris, the new chairman of the Federal Trade Commision (FTC), believes "more law enforcement, not more laws" is the best approach for now.

Annus horriblis. Oracle's problems mounted with insiders facing a lawsuit from stockholders over cashing in stocks while allegedly making misleading public statements, the discovery that "Global CRM in 90 Days," is overly optimistic, and lackluster sales of much-hyped business applications tailored to the Internet. At least Oracle CEO Larry Ellison gets to land his jet after the San Jose, Calif. airport curfew now.

Still Wired. Wireless enterprise applications have been slow to take off, as corporations show self-control by waiting for better devices and standards and greater understanding of benefits and pitfalls before taking the plunge.

Forecasting Failures. Although analysts and companies believe accurate demand forecasting can save significant amounts of money, implementation problems and inaccurate data have caused bad forecasts and huge losses — as Nike Inc. and i2 Technologies Inc. can attest to.

Slow Start for UDDI. Major vendors back the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specification, however, it's off to a slow start because of competing e-commerce standards and security and connectivity issues.

New Economy Freefall. When the economy headed south, the New Economy companies were the first to take the plunge. Technology companies and dot-coms led the fall, padding the bottom for the Old Economy Blue Chips that followed. Now terms like "profitability" are once again more important than "IPO."

Watchdog Mentality. Changing companies' inclinations from information hoarding to information sharing is one of the main obstacles to collaboration, along with privacy and trust issues.

Like a Lead Balloon. The pop of the B2C e-commerce bubble brought with it the deflation of its embellishments: clickstream analytics and personalization. These dark arts never got a chance to reach a high degree of reliability before they began losing practitioners.

Leased Appeal. Although it would be unwise to write application service providers (ASPs) off altogether, large enterprises just haven't bought into the idea of rented applications in a big way. ASPs often lack expertise in their customers' domains, and large enterprises don't like losing control of application management.

CRM: Can't Return Money? Worldwide frustration with CRM's lack of provable ROI reached a crescendo as IT spending cutbacks put many partially implemented CRM projects on hold in 2001.

Unique Chic. In the not-so-distant past, many software vendors released products ostensibly containing everything necessary "out of the box," but most have backed away from claims of universality. The death knell for "just-add-hardware" enterprise software came when Oracle admitted that most users of 11i would have to customize it and integrate other best-of-breed systems, despite previous claims to the contrary.

— Michelle Young, Jeanette Perez, and Jeanette Burriesci

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