[thrownnaway]

I found this article frustrating for its avoidance of assigning blame or fault to any of the decisions described.

For example: It seems pretty clear that a bunch of work was done on a research product for GigaOm, but their thinking around it was very off target. $79/year is less than a Netflix account costs. Yet, the author doesn't come out and say "and this proved to be a big mistake."

GigaOm sounds like a scenario where people were "playing startup" for several years and eventually reality set in. They appear to have never been profitable, yet they acquired a company, took out a disastrous loan and raised more and more money. From what I'm reading in articles like this, the people running GigaOm sound like they made a lot of dumb decisions, yes, but it also sounds like GigaOm was never really a real business at any point.

[puranjay]

Agreed and agreed. Some of those sound like classic pre dot-com crash moves. Offices in Manhattan and SF? Do you really need that? 22 writers, sales staff, developers...Honestly, you could run an operation similar to GigaOm for 1/3rd of the cost.