Totality Corporation

» see totality.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nobody ever chose Totality. It sold to whoever owned the website, never to anyone who visited one, and the entire product was a promise that you would never learn its name. That is a real category of dead company and it is the hardest kind to write down, because there is nobody left who misses it.

It started in 1999 in San Francisco under the name MimEcom, founded by Matthew Mochary with Michael Carrier as CTO. What it sold was remote management of the applications and the machines underneath a large e-commerce site. Somebody else's engineers watching your checkout page at three in the morning, from their building instead of yours. In 2000 it raised a hundred million dollars in a second round, reported at the time as the biggest of the year apart from the one its main competitor had just closed.

The competitor was Loudcloud, which is the company Marc Andreessen started after Netscape and which everyone remembers. Totality is the one doing the same work in the same city in the same months, with almost the same money behind it, and it left no trace at all. Garden.com and Bluelight.com were customers, and both of those are dot-com deaths in their own right.

~ the case file ~

~ the money ~

The idea both companies sold was that running your own infrastructure was a distraction from your actual business, and that you should rent the running of it from people who did nothing else. In 2000 that was worth nine figures on a second round. The problem was arithmetic. Managed services at that scale means humans on shift, and humans on shift do not get cheaper when you add customers, so there was no point on the curve where the margin fixed itself.

Loudcloud got out by rewriting itself as a software company, changing its name to Opsware and selling to HP for $1.6 billion in 2007. Totality did not find that second act. It found a buyer instead.

~ what it actually sold ~

The best surviving artifact of this company is its own logo. The wordmark that sat at the top of totality.com through the early 2000s reads TOTALITY in blue, with a tagline underneath in small dark type: Applicaton & Infrastructure Management. The i is missing. It is baked into the image file, on the header of every page, on the site of a company whose whole pitch was that they would catch the mistakes you did not have time to catch.

The rest of the site is standard for its moment: sliced table layouts, a case study page about a Sony deployment, a careers section built from about fifteen separate GIFs. Behind the login button was a customer portal called TotalView, which is where the actual product lived and which nobody outside the contract ever saw.

~ the day it died ~

MCI announced the purchase on 2 August 2005 and completed it on 13 September. MCI at that point was WorldCom under a different name, three years out of the largest bankruptcy in American history and already agreed to be bought itself. Verizon closed on MCI in January 2006. Totality changed hands twice inside five months and the brand did not survive the second one.

The domain tells the ending better than any press release. In August 2005 totality.com is still a full corporate site. By February 2006 it is four lines of HTML with a meta refresh pointing at the TotalView login. That redirect kept answering for another eight years, long after there was anything on the other end worth logging into, and went dark for good in late 2014.

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