[s-cars] Audifans.com in the news

[Tim Leonard]

Brett,
You hurt me........'cause I was laughing so hard!
Keep up the losses, you are good at it.
Best,
Tim Leonard
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brett Dikeman" <brett at cloud9.net>
To: <200q20v at audifans.com>; <quattro at audifans.com>;
<s-car-list at audifans.com>; <urq at audifans.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 12:54 AM
Subject: [s-cars] Audifans.com in the news


> Posted early this morning.
>
>
> NoJournalisticIntegrity.com
> The Ultimate in Unbiased Reporting
>
> Audifans.com goes IPO!
>
> WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NY  Audifans.com has announced it is in the final
> steps of an Intial Public Offering.  CEO Dan Simoes explained the
> logic behind the move: "One day, we woke up and realized, 'Shit, we'd
> been loosing money for years, why haven't we gone IPO?'.  We've been
> around for almost 15 years, and we haven't turned a profit during
> that entire time.  Our record is unmatched in the business world;
> Worldcom may have lost a couple billion, but did they do it over 15
> years?  Nope, just a few years.  How old school...they relied heavily
> on fraud.  That's what you get for having 'Grey Hairs' in your
> management team."
>
>    The numbers back up Mr. Simoes's comments; since its inception, The
> Quattro List, renamed to Audifans.com, has lost money every single
> year, according to their L/P reports. Audifans.com staff bristle at
> the suggestion that the company name was changed to take advantage of
> the "dot bomb" craze.  "We were loosing money well before we changed
> our name," stated CTO Brett Dikeman.
>
>    Under the symbol AUDI, 10,000,000 shares are to be offered at an
> initial price of $50.  A company employee, who didn't wish to be
> quoted, said "we're all very excited- many of us got great options
> packages.  Management got the best deals, rumor has it around $60 to
> 70 per share- we didn't get quite as good a deal, $40 or so.  Still,
> everyone's hoping it'll drop like a rock on the first day.  We may
> even set a record drop!"
>
>    Audifans.com hasn't rested on their laurels, as VP of Development
> Mark Chang explains: "We came to the conclusion that we just weren't
> using up enough bandwidth, so we switched to a mailing list
> management program with at least half a dozen extraneous headers.
> The new software boosted productivity- it made the lists easier to
> subscribe to, which increased the number of WebTV, AOL and Prodigy
> users.  That alone boosted the noise on-lists by a healthy 20%.  That
> wasn't enough- among other things, the sophisticated automatic
> bounce-handling worked really well, and cut down on extraneous
> bounces, negating the overhead of the extra headers.  So we added
> some web-based features whereby people could upload insanely large
> images of their cars.  It's working great- we get a return rate of
> about 10-50x on uploaded content."  There have been successes in
> hidden areas: "The Marketplace worked out better than we could have
> dreamed.  Not only do people post for-sale items in the Marketplace,
> but they post about them on-list, which has the added benefit of
> causing flame wars, and those eat up bandwidth like crazy", Chang
> says, beaming.  "I'll admit, that one was a surprise."
>
>    Not that the journey has been easy, according to Brett.  "A few
> years back, we moved off our ISDN line to a slightly higher capacity
> DSL line.  It was great, our burn rate shot through the roof.
> Unfortunately, now we're in tough times- we've got free hosting now."
>
>    Dewey, of Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe, Audifans.com's accounting and
> auditing firm, echoed the concern: "It used to be we could show a
> loss like that", he says, snapping his fingers.  "Now, we really have
> to work the books to show a loss each quarter.  Our reduced IT
> spending is killing us."
>
>    The worries have been compounded by a rock-solid IT infrastructure,
> according to Brett.  "We're using ancient technology- a single, 10
> year old Sun Sparc clone- not even a real Sun- and we had forecast
> having much more trouble with it.  While it's been slow as molasses,
> doing wonders to boost expenditures in consulting costs while people
> simply wait for it to do something- it's been dead reliable.  We're
> even using a single old hard drive for maximum unreliability.  Every
> once in a while, the drive makes a funny noise, but it just won't
> give up the ship.  We've also had some employee sabotage recently-
> during a recent server move, someone cleaned out all the dust
> bunnies.  We're still investigating that one."
>
>    "We're currently searching for a less reliable vendor to better
> meet our 99.9998% downtime goal.  We had some guys in from Microsoft,
> and they sold us in a heartbeat.  Difficult to manage, scales poorly,
> everything is proprietary, enormous resource requirements, none of
> the software is free, and the OS is unreliable and insecure.  It is a
> dream come true for us.  The only issue we haven't worked out is
> which will loose more money- making staff keep up to date with all
> the system and security updates, or leaving the system(s)vulnerable
> for people to hack."
>
>    We aren't entirely convinced- there are some glaring issues.  For
> example, a downed server consumes no bandwidth, lowering costs.  But,
> their management team shows ineptitude, and in the current market,
> loosing money is hardly challenging.
>
>    What's in store for the future?   Simoes lets the cat out of the
> bag: "We're investigating some breakthrough technologies to help
> lower our Total Profit from Ownership on our equipment.  We'll soon
> have unbeatable losses; our competitors won't know what hit us."
> --
> ----
> "They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary
> safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin
> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~brett/
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