Category: Product Design

November 1999 - Compatriots

2/12/2015

VerticalNet and Neoforma.com Announce Exclusive Multi-year E-commerce Agreement
VerticalNet, Inc. the Internet’s premier portfolio of business-to-business vertical trading communities and First Mover in the space, today announced a strategic alliance with Neoforma.com, Inc., a leading provider of B2B e-commerce services in the market for medical products, supplies and equipment . . .

Neoforma Press Release, November 22, 1999

I hadn’t exactly expected to metaphorically run toward each other in slow motion, arms outstretched, through a field of flowers on a sunny day. I just thought that we had been watching each other fondly from afar for so long that something slightly magical might happen between us when we first met...

October 1998 - Focus

1/19/2015

Neoforma Designs Website to Offer Medical Search Engine.
Online matchmaker. A website takes a page from amazon.com by linking healthcare professionals to medical products, hardware and services . . .

American Medical News, October 19, 1998

Healthcare Goes Online
Neoforma brings medical community closer via the Web. Until now, the healthcare industry has been slow to move its business processes to the Internet — but that’s changing. Neoforma Inc. is joining VHA Inc. and other companies building online trading communities for the healthcare industry . . .

Information Week, October 19, 1998

Neoforma Makes Itself Indispensable to Buyers and Sellers
The reactions of some of the first buyers and sellers to Neoforma, a new market targeted at hospitals, are the kind that any infomediary could envy. These guys are doing several things right . . .

Net Market Makers October 26, 1998

So much that hadn’t been possible before suddenly seemed inevitable. We passionately came to believe that it was our responsibility to pursue every opportunity.

The Chief Medical Officer of one of the world’s largest aid organizations was going to be quoted in an upcoming article saying that Neoforma was the—sort of—“medical Yahoo” of search engines...

November 1997 - Tweening

12/18/2014

Seller, Beware: The Buyers Rule E-Commerce
The laws of E-commerce are being written by buyers, not sellers. The future won’t be pretty for companies that don’t start paying attention now . . . Some cutting-edge companies will find ways to leverage this new buyer-centric environment to their advantage . . .

Fortune, November 10, 1997

The moments we felt strongest always seemed to coincide with the moments we were most vulnerable.

In addition to the difficulty of filling in our technology team, we had other new challenges to meet. Compared to the nearly infinite data available on the Internet, our previously deep and robust product catalog on CD flattened to a shallow, sparse database.

October 1997 - The Web

12/17/2014

Who would have thought that the medium could become the message?

We were still basically giving away CDs loaded with catalog information and calculational tools to help hospitals and architects. I know that sounds kind of dry. But it was the size and scope of it that was exciting...

June 1997 - The Audience

12/9/2014

The unsatisfied customer is the most important customer.

One day, I was at home showing off the Neoforma website to my father-in-law. At the time, he was a dentist, computer-illiterate, impatient and prone to doing things the old, familiar way, unless the new way was unequivocally proven to be vastly more efficient...

March 1997 - Word of Mouth

12/4/2014

We hadn’t really expected to be in the business of helping to ease the discomfort of rats, but once things got going, there was really no way of knowing where they might lead.

In 1996, at the request of the local Varian salesmen, I had traveled to Australia to show off the software Jeff and I had written. One of the venues I had gone to was a prestigious teaching hospital...

May 1996 - The Frontier

11/21/2014

Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 Beta Now Available
Microsoft Corp. today announced the immediate, worldwide availability of Microsoft® Internet Explorer version 3.0 beta software, the next generation of its popular World Wide Web browser . . . For users, Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 provides a dynamic browsing experience for viewing content created in
Java, JavaScript, Netscape™ Plug-ins . . .

Microsoft Press Release
May 29, 1996

I’d like to say that we had it all figured out from the beginning. That we knew the Internet would be the hot place to be. But it wasn’t like that at all.

Our survival would depend on how efficiently we could get our message out to a diverse and potentially hostile audience. While we had great advocates using our software, we weren’t certain how openly we would be welcomed by healthcare equipment suppliers...

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