There is a great piece of history at ITtoolbox about the demise of CommerceOne once the unrivalled star in ecommerce and now bankrupt:

"By 1999 when dot-coms hawking everything from dog food to dining room tables began to plunge back to earth, start-ups and giant software makers were chasing Hoffman's strategy to use the Internet to help companies do business with each other. Analysts predicted that by 2005, $6 trillion of commerce would take place on the Internet.

In the fall of 1999, Hoffman inked a deal to power General Motors' online marketplace, establishing Commerce One as a major player and leading to dozens of deals to set up online marketplaces for companies and industries.

...

But Hoffman and his lieutenants refused to jettison workers en masse. They kept 3,000 employees for much of 2001 despite a failed attempt to revive sales by revamping its online marketplace software. Hoffman says he thought the economy would recover, pinning his hopes on optimistic analysts' forecasts. "It probably was a mistake," Hoffman conceded. "We certainly chased the curve going down."

With Commerce One's prospects dimming, Hoffman reached a tentative deal to merge with SAP in August 2001. But Hoffman's reception on a visit to SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, was cooler than he expected. "I just got this uneasy feeling while I was there,'" Hoffman recalled. "When I walked out of there, I was thinking 'This isn't a done deal.' We hadn't thought about life without SAP."

Two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they had to. The break-up devastated Commerce One, which began to flatline without SAP. Commerce One's leadership team was in turmoil. High-profile executives came and went in a costly turnstile.

In the end, Commerce One faced an expensive, complicated and painful wind down: the difficult task of negotiating hundreds of millions of dollars in liabilities for real estate all over the world -- some of the most expensive office space ever rented in San Francisco and even one top executive's home -- and round after round of layoffs."

The amazing thing about Commerce One is that it really had huge sales figures once. Most dotcom companies never achieved much sales and just spend investors money. While C1 was never profitable it deployed products to dozens of Fortune 500 customers around the world. Juding in hindsight Hoffman failed to adopt to the changed picture in the marketplace but blinded by seeing the companies history wouldn't it be hard for everybody in has place to forecast that all these 'happy' customers would completely refuse to buy anything in just a couple of years? Though thing...