This whole "dot com" period from around 1992 to 2005 has to do with a revolution in the technological world; a crazy rise and fall of tech startups and websites. Basically, if you added a ".com" to the end of your business name, you were bound to make a fortune -- at least for a while.
All of these different technological organizations back then are best represented by a dinosaur race (credit goes to Andrew). Dinosaurs have ruled the earth, and were constantly competing against each other. During this period, some were dominantly leading in the race, and some got left behind and just collapsed. However, since they are figuratively dinosaurs, they all ultimately suffered from their inability to adapt to a new environment, the bursting of the dot.com bubble, and became instinct.
There were five stages during those few years:
1. Innocent Beginning (92-95)
2. Boom! (95-97)
3. Insanity!!! (97-00)
4. Bust!@#$%! (00-03)
5. Crawling Back (02-05)
During the first stage, guys like Prodigy, CompuServ, AOL, Genie, and Andrew's very own Free Range Media emerged, and acquired a good amount of success. Prodigy and CompuServ, each with over one million users at the time, were the leaders of the dinosaur race.
The second stage is where a lot more guys started showing up and were getting a lot more involved. Yahoo! was one of the dinosaurs that came from behind and managed to get in front at one point. Amazon was there too, although everyone believed that it would not survive at all. Quite a few more companies grew extremely fast as well.
At the third stage, public offerings and venture capitalists were the trend. AOL actually buys CompuServ, and passes Prodigy in the race. Yahoo! get Broadcast.com at 5.7 billion dollars. Everything is just as it is named; insane.
Then everything crashes. Websites and companies are going bust here and there, and the stock market takes a dive down.
But this doesn't mean the tech world has ended. Some start rebounding, support is provided, and sites like MySpace and Facebook emerge.
I was not old enough to understand the weight it had when this all happened. I still don't completely understand even after a lecture on it. But I know the dot com boom to bust was an important event that impacted the somewhat technological life that I currently live.
No comments:
Post a Comment