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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.


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