Netpliance - i-Opener

No look at retro Super Bowl ads would be complete without taking a look back at the dot com era of the late 90s/early 2000s.

From 1999 to 2001, the Super Bowl was loaded with commercials from start-up internet businesses.  One of the problems these companies had was that they spent a ton on advertising, instead of worrying about such things like a sustainable business model.

Here is one such example:

I'm not sure any of us remember the company Netpliance, but apparently they had an commercial during the 2000 Super Bowl:

Apparently, back in 2000, people who used the internet were perceived a little differently than they are today.  According to this commercial, back then the internet was still the domain of nerds and geeks (who are easily identifyable by their large rimmed, taped glasses.)

Maybe I'm misremembering things, but weren't most people in America using the internet by 2000?  I mean, "You've got mail" had become a common enough phrase that they used it as the title of a movie two years earlier.  It might have been a bad movie, but it starred Tom Hanks, so I'm sure that a decent amount of people saw it.

Yet this commercial seems to assume that up until this point, the only people using the internet were nerds.  Mostly because the internet required the use of a computer.  And only nerds used computers!

I guess Netpliance didn't realize that there was a booming personal computer market.  Or that the reason all these dot coms were starting up was because a lot of people were indeed using the internet.

But reacting to the perceived problem of non-nerds not being able to use the internet, Netpliance came up with a solution: The i-Opener!  It allows you to access the internet without the use of a computer.

Am I missing something, or doesn't the i-Opener look an awful lot like a computer?

I decided to do some research on the i-Opener, and found that the company sold it at a loss in order to sell online access subscriptions.  Back in the day, there was speculation that this would be a common business model.

The business plan failed because of the very people they were advertising against: Nerds. 

Technically saavy users discovered that the i-Opener could be configured into a fully operational PC.  So they bought the i-Opener, reconfigured it, cancelled their subscriptions, and essentially had purchased a really cheap computer.
Rating: 1 TV - This commercial wasn't especially funny, nor did it seem to have a grasp on the market it was trying to reach.  It's no wonder that the company failed.