I miss the late 90’s era Internet boom.  Not just because I miss my own stock options doubling in value every 12-18 months (God knows I miss that, especially these days what with 2 kids and all), but more because I miss all of the crazy insanity of the time.

Here are some of the companies I miss:

• HomeGrocer.com – I bought into the whole marketing schtick of the guy driving the big truck with the orange on it.  Amazon.com now has “AmazonFresh” which brings back some of the missed glory from this company. 
• Webvan.com (after they killed HomeGrocer.com) – Safeway and Albertson’s delivery are but a pale immitation of HomeGrocer and Webvan.
• Kozmo.com – I personally loved how you could order a SINGLE ODWALLA JUICE and get that delivered to you NO CHARGE in under an hour!  It was insane!  It was the most incredibly decadent service you could imagine, and it was real for a time.  I’m sure it scaled better in places like Chicago and NYC where people lived vertically rather than places like Seattle where people live more horizontally.
• Amazon.com – Yes, I know Amazon’s still around.  But somehow I miss the times where the future was questionable for that company.  Back then there was this seat-of-your-pants manic-ness about Amazon that somehow doesn’t exist today.  It’s a great ecommerce site.  I buy a higher percentage of goods from Amazon more than any other non-grocery retailer – web or bricks-n-mortar.  Now, AMZN is also a platform company.  There’s a great future in their EC2 and S3 platform play. 
• MyLacky.com – We didn’t use this company much, but being able to outsource things like dry cleaning pick-up and house cleaning was pretty nice.  If we had a dog, we might have even outsourced dog walking.  Problem was, that they were not hiring ‘cheap’ labor.  There was no way this business was going to scale.

I’m sure there’s a whole ton of other companies that I’ve already forgotten about that seemed to good to be true.  Of course, they were, I suppose.  There’s a few that are still around (e.g. Amazon, OpenTable, eBay, Netflix, Buy, etc.) and I suppose those brands that have made it this far are likely to be fairly solid by this point.  Still, I miss the 90’s.  Especially in the current days of doom and gloom.  Back then, it was small guys giving things away for free so they could survive.  These days, it’s the big guys giving things away for free so that they can kill off the rest.