Were you around for the dotcom bubble? Silicon Valley was like a second Wall Street during the late 90s to early 2000s and for good reason. Websites and data were hot commodities, something that you could readily say even today. However, when the bottom fell out, it fell out hard. Today, we’re looking at some of the lasting effects this had on computing to the present day.
What Was the Dotcom Bubble?
When talking about the Dotcom Bubble, we’re referring to the meteoric rise of many internet-based companies out of Silicon Valley in the 1990s. If you’re looking for the original startup cultures, this is it. Companies were founded and experienced massive growth and fortune seemingly overnight.
Companies like eBay, Amazon, and Netflix are all household names now and can trace their roots back to being founded during the Dotcom Bubble itself. However, the bottom fell out in 2000 with steep declines in the stock market.
The first natural casualty of this was the tech industry, which had been an investment darling for over half a decade. You needed a product to be valued, at least that’s conventional wisdom. Many of these internet companies were selling a dream and a promise, but never delivering.
What Lessons Were Learned?
Silicon Valley has certainly bounced back in the nearly 25 years since the collapse of the Dotcom Bubble. This marked a paradigm shift of sorts when it came to fledgling startups. You no longer could coast by on promising a greater tomorrow. You had to have an end goal in sight, a product or service to hook people in.
Now, we’ve certainly seen this in the years since. However, this collapse led to a massive economic recession, something that marked the opening years of George W. Bush’s first term. Further, it dispelled the notion that companies could just get by with nothing to offer.
In most businesses, you’ll consider the minimum viable product before developing your short and long-term goals. During the height of the Dotcom Bubble, many startups were swimming in investment capital for the sheer sake of trying to ride the wave.
How It Has Shaped Modern Computing
Silicon Valley went from being the new kid on the block to adhering to more traditional business practices. Even when you consider modern business methodologies, like Agile or Lean Six Sigma, there is a foundation and undercurrent that speaks to folks who survived and persevered through the Dotcom Bubble burst.
Modern computing, and the internet at large, owes quite a bit to the bubble bursting as it were. You could theoretically sell a product with no potential end goal, as seen with social media. However, it requires discipline and the sort of decision-making a wunderkind programmer isn’t accustomed to.
If anything, it opens the doorway to businesspeople coming in to navigate the rigors of the market at large. That said, we’ve seen great innovations in the years since. I have worked for startups in the past where it wasn’t a promise, but there was a product or service mostly developed before the company even went live.
Conclusion
The Dotcom Bubble is an interesting thing to look back on. For many of us, it was part of our formative years. The sudden deluge of websites and tacky tie-ins meant to take up dial-up time went by the wayside. The internet wasn’t so much a miracle cure for what might ail you, but another tool that could be used to help deliver your brand’s message.
Thankfully, it killed off Pets.com, which burned its jingle into my mind over many morning breakfasts watching cartoons.
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