SAN FRANCISCO -- Reading the morning papers here on Thursday, you might have guessed there would be gloom among the city's tech set.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle: "80 percent of S.F. Dot-Coms Seen in Danger." It cites a survey by the real estate research firm Rosen Consulting.
The study, which was first publicized on Wednesday in a Wall Street Journal report, said that eight out of 10 Internet companies in San Francisco will "die" in the next year, leaving up to 30,000 people jobless.
But a haphazard bit of research conducted by Wired News on Thursday revealed something altogether more shocking: There aren't any dot-coms in San Francisco.
Well, that's exaggerating the case somewhat -- but several companies here did say that they weren't at all worried about this bleak dot-com forecast, because, well, they weren't any dot-coms.
"There's no question that we started as a dot-com," said David Lewis, a marketing manager at CareGuide, a San Francisco-based company that arranges health care for seniors. "The nut of it is, more than a year ago we changed our business model substantially, and realized that eldercare management is simply not an online deliverable. So at this juncture we do not consider ourselves a dot-com."
Lewis was being sincere -- his company had changed a lot during the past year and its new business model, he said, is paying off nicely.
The thing is, though, all the Internet companies here seem to have a new business model that is working well. Many say they saw the bad times coming, and they "retooled" in time to avoid being crushed by the crashing Nasdaq.
In fact, everyone contacted by Wired News was sure that the doom and gloom was someone else's problem.
"That number doesn't surprise me," said Alex Stack, a spokesman for eTango.com, "but I'm not worried. We have paying customers, we're not backed by any VCs and we've been in business since 1998."
Other firms, though, should be panicking. "They weren't living in reality -- their business models didn't work," Stack said.
Apparently, those "other firms" won't stand up and be counted until they're down for the final count.
ArtistOne.com, which is a kind of online record label, is among the many that have recently refocused. The company is located near South Park, widely credited as being the capital of S.F. dot-com mania. Although it's still hanging on to the dot-com suffix, in many other ways, CEO Michael Moroney said, ArtistOne no longer resembles its dot-com brethren.
"Their initial plan, and ours, was to get as much market share as we could," he said. "But as the money dried up, we saw that we had to scale back, and we adjusted our revenue models. In the last few months we've been able to get cash-flow positive."
And like a lot of other tech companies, Moroney said he didn't think this "shakeout" was so bad. "For us, it might be a very good thing -- a lot of our competition has failed," he said.
The Rosen Report also noted that real estate prices in the city might start falling due to lowered demand for space, and this news did seem to cheer some in the area. "I saw the story and I wondered if our rent will go down," said Kathryn Shantz, a spokeswoman for the Web-directory company Looksmart.
After "seeing the writing on the wall" last year, Shantz said that Looksmart, too, has recently made some changes to its business. Instead of listing companies for free in its directory -- which is used by such sites as iWon and AltaVista -- Looksmart now charges a fee, she said, because online advertising is no longer seen as a good source of revenue.
"So as far as the doom and gloom of dot-coms going out of business, LookSmart is not going to be one of them," she said. "We're on track for one of our best years ever."
Shantz's glass-half-full outlook seems infectious. All of the companies contacted for this story said they saw no reason to leave San Francisco, and they all cited pretty much the same thing: "This is where the pulse of the Internet emanates from," as eTango's Stack said.
The only difference is, the Internet's pulse is no longer about dot-coms.
"That's unfashionable," said Alan Brooks, the vice president of marketing for CaseCentral, which used to be CaseCentral.com. "I would say that we're an 'enterprise solutions company.'"
