Skip to main content

Dot.com to Dot.Bomb


In class, we had a lecture and discussion about the history of the dot.com to dot.bomb era, where the market was full of a hype and rush of new tech companies that ended in a bust of  closures and bankruptcies. The lecture was a supplement to the ‘Startup.com’ documentary, which shows the story of two young entrepreneurs’ startup company during this era.
Although funny yet interesting enough, Andrew the analogy of uh.. aging dinosaurs to represent the race between tech companies during the dot.com era, and their quest to be ahead of technology and the market. Dinosaurs CompuServe, Prodigy, Yahoo, and AOL, all of which were the big names during that time, who through how much do those names ring any bell (or at all) to us students, went through series of booms and bust in their developments.
The era was full of insanity!! Investors were diving into throwing their money out there in hopes of making profits to companies full of (false/nonexistent) promises. As technology boom was new and innovative, so was its unpredictable marketplace; and investors were taking risks that they wouldn’t normally take. Want to start a tech company? Make it .com! pretty much $*** was exploding!.
2000-2003 was where the climax of the story.  Many people realized that companies were full of false promises. The “burn rate”—money spending/funding vs. actual gained revenue—was a total negative to majority of new companies from the era.  Companies declared bankruptcies, the stock market takes a down turn, and companies go bust.  Not a lot of companies survived, although some did crawl back, and some even became big names today.
If there’s anything for me to take from this dinosaurs experience is the realization that: technology and people were crazy and it feels really weird living in the current modern technological advanced world and learning about the craziness that is the Jurassic era of technology.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

3 Business Ideas

Coding Review/Mentoring As a CS student who only started learning about coding since freshman year of college and had to mostly learn coding styles, standards, and conventions on my own through classes (which I also feel that majority of CS students go through the same process), I feel that aren’t many resources established around school campuses that are dedicated to helping students learn these useful fundamentals. When it comes to English writing classes, there are writing centers, tutoring, even paper review services that are available to help students improve their writing skills. In the same way for coding, I think a business that aims to help students improving their coding skills, reviewing their codes, and giving feedback can be something that’s extremely helpful at the same time profitable. Obviously, the business idea is limited to the marketplace of only college students and younger adults. On top of that, CS programs around the local area are very strict on academic int...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shadrach White Visit

Shadrach White is the CEO of CloudPWR, who we had the opportunity to hear from as our final guest speaker. Shadrach started his vision around the year of 2010-2011 when he saw cloud computing as the next generation emerging technology that will be used widely. Too much of his back then business partners’ disagreement, who did not see cloud computing the same way as he does, Shadrach  left his old company and started what is now CloudPWR. Not only did he prioritize something that not a lot of people see then, Shadrach also has a different targeted market than majority of tech companies—government sector. He believes that this market is approachable, despite the fact that the government sector did not buy into cloud computing due to security risks at the time, and that if he were able to make connections, then it’ll be easier in the future to continue expanding his business in this market. And it sure did, Shadrach’s company to this date is working with at least 100 clients aroun...
Post a Comment
Read more

Protecting Business Intellectual Property

Being a service-based business, there aren’t that many things that are considered intellectual property that need to be protected. The only thing that I can come up as being closest to needing intellectual property is the copyrights to the business’s website code.   The code is used to create the business’s property and is part of the company’s property. Although not directly belonging to the intellectual property zone, securing a domain name that closely resembles the business name is also a must we are trying to run our service orders through online website. As far as the business model goes, it is a market full of similar service, hence similar business models. Getting a copyright to a business model that everyone knows about is not very beneficial. However, I think the business will have a good number of trade secrets including distribution methods, customer profiles, and advertising methods. As the business aims to gain reputation through advertising agreements with local st...
Post a Comment
Read more