Winfire splits: lawsuit, search for profit (old news - 09:40PM Tuesday Jan 16 2001) tags: trouble
Chris Farnsworth of the Orange County Register has just written an interesting summary on Winfire (FreeDSL), which has just announced it will split into three companies. Since the "DSL depression", the Winfire (advertising based) free ISP model was looking more and more dated. Evidently, behind the scenes, troubles were indeed piling up: article here.
So here is a company that wanted to do bandwidth on demand, network firewalling, and a host of other services...all for free. Lets take a look at what you get with Winfire.
1) 2 guys who made bank from stupid CMGI ventures open Winfire to sell this funky browser bar technology. 2) They CREATE a client called FREEDSL.com so they create demand for Winfire. 3) They tell all their employees that they are 'going out' 4) They realize they need something more than 1000 customers on a FREEDSL network so they rollup WINFIRE into FREEDSL to create Winfire the movie. 5) They realize they can't get out...they also realize that they can't get any more funding. 6) They continue to make a go of it with 6 (six) Nortel Shasta boxes which they were GIVEN on loan. (try searving 51% of the country with 6 boxes) 7) Now they SPIN OFF two companies under the Steelberg brothers parent company hoping obviously to attract a buyer or stupid investor who believes that 1 company with a bad business model is worthless, but 2 companies with bad business models and no clients (except themselves) must be worth something.
8) Put on the extra strong expresso cause anyone who invests in these guys is gonna nead a cure for this hangover.
Time to cash in and move on guys....the party is way over
