The much-vaunted Quixtar.com site opened, but not on 9/1/99 as promised, and with a distinct thud. The site was essentially inaccessible for 36 hours after the promised launch.

Corp. VP Ken McDonald, of course, had lots of good excuses, but the fact remains that the site was virtually nonfunctional for the first 5-7 days, depending on who you talk to, and even now, two weeks after launch, it's still unreliable. Tons of error messages, slow loading of pages, inability to process requests, and so on.

Of course, IBOs are claiming that this is a wonderful situation -- it's so positive, because it means that so many people are visiting the site, they claim. No, it's not positive, it's incompetent.

With as much traffic as Quixtar claimed to expect, making the decision to go with a Microsoft NT system was not a smart move: Unix would have handled the demand more gracefully. But, of course, they wanted the association with that Microsoft name. After all, new prospects would not have been nearly as impressed with inflated claims of Unix' involvement as they were with inflated claims of MS' involvement.

As IBOs' frustrations grew with their inability to access Quixtar, hits on my site increased. One page on this site saw hits jump 700% in one day. And as the IBOs visited my site, they sent me more and more hate mail, as though somehow I was responsible for Quixtar's nonfunctioning. Very strange. . .

Now that Quixtar is up -- sort of -- and limping along, more partner stores have been added. Of course, we're still not seeing the well-known and impressive partner stores that IBOs have been touting for months. Still no Nordstroms, Amazon.com, or any of the other big names that IBOs claimed they had lined up. Don't see any car dealerships listed either. . . So much for being able to buy everything through Quixtar, including automobiles.

Click here for a complete list of partner stores, as of 9/9/99.