Roadkill Alert: Weebiz

I once took a class from a marketing professor who had literally had a garage full of failed products, kind of an island of misfit toys for consumer packaged goods. The guy was hilarious because his urgency to buy a new product was inversely proportional to his estimated chance of its success. You'd get the sense he'd want to cancel class just to rush down to the store quickly to buy a particularly dubious new offering, like Crystal Pepsi or the Arch Deluxe burger (which unfortunately doesn't keep as well in the garage), while it was still on the market.

I think archiving this stuff is an excellent idea because the brain, my brain at least, has a natural tendency to forget the failures and remember the successes. Quick, name ten new recent successful products or services! Quick, name ten failures!

I do a much better job on the successes -- I suspect like everyone -- so it's great when someone can stand in front a class with literally scores of rejects like Ben-Gay Aspirin, Harley Davidson perfume, Bic underwear, the Premier smokeless cigarette, or Corfam fake leather. (See this list for more.)

I must say he was wrong sometimes; he gave Zima low odds and while it eventually succumbed to a long, slow, painful death, it did have a 15-year run. There's always a hazard in estimating the success of a consumer product when you're not in the target market: I never had Zima and if I go to Japan again (the last place where it's still sold), I won't have one there either. So I'm the wrong guy to predict its success, from self-extrapolation at least. It really wasn't aimed at me.

Being naturally cynical, I sometimes have a desire to make my own roadkill list and, unlike consumer products, websites don't take space in the gargage. So this morning, when I read about Weebiz, "a social network for companies," I had to suppress my desire to start my own garage full of websites with Weebiz as the first entrant.

Either I totally don't get it, or you should run down and check it out quickly. In addition to my gut reaction that "companies aren't people and don't have friends" they're getting a few next-positioning comments on their sponsored ReadWriteWeb story, which I also view as a bit of a curse. If you want other bad omens, the Weebiz logo looks a lot like the new Google Wave logo, which probably won't go over too well with Google's lawyers.

I don't get it. If you do, please explain it to me.

Weebiz presentation from Weebiz.com on Vimeo.