Cul-de-sac.com
IF you want to read someone's excursus on `Whither the dot.com economy', you may have to fall back on mine. Don't try The Street.com.uk, which has turned out to be more of a cul-de-sac. It was launched in the spring with the cheery assurance that its electronic City pages would put paid to paper and ink, but it now joins the lengthen- ing list of dot.coms which seemed a good idea at the time. Easier.com, which traded houses over the internet, has decided to quit while it still has cash in the bank. Most of the others ran out and could raise no more. Their burn rates (their way of measuring the pace at which they got through money) consumed them. Running out of money is always and everywhere fatal to businesses, and some of these had nothing more going for them than the dot in their name, but their fate suggests that the old economy still has some fight in it. Paper and ink are still with us and so is s-commerce, the S, as you will recall, standing for shops.
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