Mercury News: Online grocer Webvan closes, will file for bankruptcy. Consumer advocates said the deal is troubling because it would shrink even further the number of major players in the cable TV market. Comcast is now the third largest cable company in the country with about 8.5 million subscribers. After the merger, it would have 22 million subscribers, or about 10 million more than AOL Time Warner, the second-largest owner of cable systems.
With a sad whimper, the bubble is finally gone.
Webvan never made much sense, unless you believed the low-margin grocery business could somehow be recreated as a higher-volume delivery business. That wasn’t the ultimate intention, of course — the company intended to become the new Wal-Mart, just as Amazon intends to do.
But Webvan, at least, was trying for an infrastructure play that simply mande no sense. The investors who put so much money into this turkey must be furious, but they did it, for the most part, with their eyes open.
Have a bit of sympathy, though, for the sucker small investors who got screwed by the greedy Wall Streeters — the investment banks, “analysts” and brokerages that sold a turkey and claimed it was an eagle. What the money crowd forgot to mention, as they always do, is that even turkeys can soar in a tornado.