Yeah I think even back then folks had started to realise that there was no productised solution to the business problem of “build me a special snowflake website exactly to my needs”, so all those companies ended up basically being massive PS / consulting businesses with a modicum of product in the middle in order to try to get product company valuations. Fast forward to today and the product bit has basically been dropped and companies who need anything beyond a cookie-cutter wordpress or squarespace or whatever website will hire a web developer (or several), and just have them whip something up in Drupal or Joomla or whatever their framework of choice is.

I got out of that space circa 2009 or so, as I’d had enough of being a consultant on the receiving end of someone else’s crappy WCM “product”. 😉