Dot.com to Dot.Bomb

The story of the dot com boom, bubble and burst cycle as told by our professor who lived and worked through it, using dinosaurs. The nineties were an interesting time. The internet was in the process of becoming the next great entrepreneurial frontier and everyone who could get into the game was. In the early part of the explosive growth the internet was viewed mostly as a fad or a tool for university students and major corporations to utilize for academic and research purposes. There was once a time when not everyone had access to the net and not everyone viewed it as part of their normal daily routines. This was a time that I lived through as well, although I was in my adolescence during the Clinton years I still remember most of the topics and some of the major events covered. The companies such as GEnie, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL and of course Netscape were some of the ones that I used myself. While the net was still young the majority of people who thought that it would become something large didn’t quite understand how large it would become. The world wide web project broke open the flood gates to the world. Now that everyone was connected to the same inter-connected net anyone could be in instant contact with anyone else in the world through the medium of a computer. A new form of communications was born and those who were in the forefront stood to make a lot of money, if they could adapt. Adaptation was the key here though and because of trepidations and just general confusion on industry early adapters most of those who got in early were doomed to fail. Ultimately what ended up causing the massive burst of the bubble was the greed of investors, simply because a company declared itself an online company was often enough to garner that company millions in initial investment capital as investors were clamoring over each other to “get in on” the next big thing. The failure came when those companies who swelled so large so quickly were no longer able to sustain their rate of growth. So much money was funneled in and so many people were instantly cash flush that the system couldn’t possibly stand under its own weight. Of course, there is still an internet around and there is still money to be made, however the bubble has popped and now the industry environment has settled into just another everyday part of life. Much like the telecoms.