Webvan.com, which bought out the Kirkland-based HomeGrocer.com, is calling it quits. Like a lot of venture-capital-chompin’ dot-coms, it tried to “get big fast” by spending heavily on high-profile operations and advertising. Unlike other dot-coms, it had to also spend tons on warehouses, trucks, and merchandise in a notoriously low-margin industry.

The consumer-level “Internet revolution,” meanwhile, crawled as high-speed home connections remained costly and sparse. (Ever try to access HomeGrocer or Webvan on a 56K modem? Not pretty.) But Webvan couldn’t wait for the bugs to be worked out of the process. With its truckers and its conveyer belts in a half-dozen big metro areas, it had to immediately hit it big and stay there.

Why, many are now asking, did anybody (especially in the investment community) think that was sure to happen?

One possible answer: A mistaken comparison between the early WWW and the early cable TV.

Today’s 206-channel cable landscape is still largely dominated by the channels launched in the business’s 1976-84 infancy–CNN, ESPN, Nickelodeon, HBO, MTV, Discovery–and their latter-day subsidiary channels. But that’s because channel capacity was so limited all those years; would-be competitors couldn’t get on enough cable systems. In contrast, anybody can put up a web server, and anybody with an ad budget can get it promoted. Potential profitability in consumer e-commerce, if it comes, will come not from early “mind space” domination but by buildiing a service people want to use, offering products people want to buy.

In short, from doing the boring stuff and doing it properly.

A lesson the entirety of e-commerce should have learned from the pre-Webvan grocery business.