Under the Desktop: Dot-Going, Dot-Going, Dot-Gone
“Who’s bidding against me?” the genius programmer cried, spinning around to face the crowd of eager bargain hunters. Was his competition friend or foe? He hoped to spy some friendly face, someone who didn’t realize it was he who was up front bidding, someone who wouldn’t jack up the price in $1,000 increments. What was at stake? Only years worth of intellectual effort, goodwill, and — more important — the dream. His query — and hope — was in vain, even imprudent. The auctioneer counseled the codemaster to turn his back to the competition and pay attention to the task at hand. The bidding resumed.
Who would imagine that a geek auction would hold such drama?
In my previous column, I described the scene at the liquidation of Phoenix POP Productions‘ assets. In part two, I’ll take the lessons gleaned from the first auction as well as those uncovered in a larger event that mingled the stuff from several dot-coms, including B2B e-commerce vendor Cohera and Eazel, a former darling of the Open Source/Linux industry. (According to a recent thestreet.com article Cohera’s technology was recently purchased by PeopleSoft.
The Cohera/Eazel liquidation was run by Cowan Alexander Equipment Group, an auction house that specializes in high-technology auctions around the country. These events feature mass quantities of goods and large crowds. The company offered bidders a 30-page catalog listing almost 1,200 items.
The auction took place at Cohera’s former digs in a Hayward, Calif., office park. The rooms were packed with property, each assigned a lot number: Several offices were filled with desktop and notebook computers; another held an assortment of Sun workstations, servers, and RAID boxes; and a few small spaces were floor-to-ceiling with 21-inch monitors still in the cartons. Of course, there were all sizes and shapes of Herman Miller chairs — Aeron and its lesser-priced siblings — enough, it seemed, to fill a warehouse.
As before, cash or its equivalents were the only forms of payment accepted at the Cohera/Eazel auction. However, bidders weren’t required to put up a cash deposit to bid on an item, unlike the San Francisco shindig I previously described. Instead, Cowan Alexander asked potential bidders to fill out a form with contact information. (Some privacy advocates might have preferred the deposit.) However, if a bidder ran up a tab of perhaps $10,000 or so, he or she would be asked to pay that portion of the tab before continuing to accumulate further items.
As usual, the auction house charged a 10-percent surcharge on each item purchased as well as sales tax on the total. This came to about 18 percent.
Auction-Packed Adventure
The sheer size of Cohera/Eazel auction made a tremendous difference to its speed and the bidding competition for items: With so many lots to sell, the auctioneers pressed the pace, and with more than 250 bidders (a crowd at least four times larger than the previous auction in San Francisco), the bidding often grew furious.
The auctioneer and his minions sat at a raised table at the front of a large room packed with tall cubicles. Crowded in the aisles and scattered around the maze of cubes were the bidders. Bidders often had a hard time seeing the auctioneer, so a helper stood on a table, his head almost touching the ceiling, and made eye contact with bidders, and directed their bids to the lead auctioneer.
Bargains were available for buyers with plenty of cash and empty storage space. For example, a single Sony 21-inch monitor went for $350 ($413 with surcharge and taxes), about half the cost of a new display. However, the next bidder bought 10 monitors for $200 ($236) each and the subsequent buyer took away 21 displays for $175 ($207) each. Of course, you would have to haul away and store almost two dozen monitors. But you get the idea.
One dramatic moment came with surprise announcement of a lot not listed in the program: the sale of Eazel’s source code trademarks and domain. Andy Herzfeld, the renowned genius programmer who in the early 1980s had created much of the Macintosh user interface and Finder, walked to the front of the room, dressed in a plain green t-shirt and jeans. He had reportedly promised the Open Source community that he would continue developing the Nautilus interface for Linux and host the Eazel site.
The first query from the auctioneer was for $10,000 and then a call of $5,000. But the real bidding started at just $1,000. Within seconds, however, the price rose past $3,000 and Herzfeld looked alarmed.
It was obvious from Herzfeld’s expression that he hadn’t expected this heavy bidding. Who would want this stuff? He turned about and faced the bidders in the aisle, looking for a former Eazel coworker or perhaps a familiar Linux guru. Perhaps this unknown but presumably sympathetic bidder didn’t realize that he or she was bidding against Herzfeld.
The auctioneer told Herzfeld to forget the crowd and to focus on the business at hand: making the high bid. The question of the mysterious competitor would have to wait. Herzfeld responded and the bidding continued in $500 increments until he won the lot at $4,500.
“People will speculate on anything,” auction house owner Don Cowan said. Indeed, he added that whoever bid against Herzfeld may not have known anything about Eazel or its Open Source contributions. If an opportunist considered that someone in the crowd was willing to pay $1,000 for a parcel of goodwill, there might be another, somewhere, who might be willing to pay more. Fortunately for Herzfeld, the mystery bidder was only willing to go as high as $4,000.
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