Many of the sites and businesses in the first bubble did at least work; I don't think that was the main problem. They just weren't able to make money. To pick two notorious examples: WebVan really did deliver groceries, and the customer experience was fairly popular; and GeoCities was a reasonably well run site that fostered a lot of user-generated content. But WebVan couldn't pay for its operations and scaled up way too fast, and GeoCities, while it would've been a good idea at a lower valuation, wasn't worth the $3.5 billion that Yahoo paid for it.