Slashdot Mirror
Have We Learned from the New Economy?
prostoalex writes "The new issue of Fast Company magazine looks at the so-called New Economy in retrospect. There were some myths about the Internet that were not true, or could be considered true only partially in the brief history of the Internet boom, there were people who got burned and those who nicely cashed out and then there were those who had to start a new life because of the Internet."
made technology startups mainstream news; focused public awareness and attention on the internet and what it can allow you to do. All of these are good things. It showed people what would work and what wouldn't. Sometimes in a stark and brutal fashion. I can't say it was an era that should have never happened, because sometime, somewhere, you need to make that leap of faith from merely thinking about a business to actually starting one. The new economy gave lots of budding entrepreneurs the chance to get their feet wet, chances that they may not have gotten before..Google came from the dotcom era, didn't it?
The best thing to come out of the whole "new economy" for me was the experience that I got.. Never jump into a project without a cold blooded analysis of risk vs reward, never go into a company because they "look" exciting; check the fundamental things out first. Feather your nest, because you never know if things could change for the worse tomorrow. In short, be conservative.
All the same, I wish I had graduated just a couple of years sooner (1997-1998) because regardless of competency or suitability, being called an "architect" fresh out of college gives you experience at that level that would otherwise take years to achieve.. Good times, good times.
Anyone ever heard of that company? I used to work for them back in 1998-2000. It was supposed to be a huge (as Amazon) online store where people could by gifts chosen from our catalog that had thousands of gift items from jewelry (high end stuff) to home and garden, business, kids gifts, kitchen and food items to flowers. There was a gift reminder service (a personal event calendar where you enter event b-day's, etc.) that would remind you to buy a gift for the scheduled event, it would even provide a few suggestions based on info you provided.
The only problem was that the owners allegedly sold private shares of stock illegally. (A court Minnesota ruled against the company is several lawsuits brought by shareholders). The bankruptcy still lingers on. The thousands of shares I received for being an employee are worthless. My belief now is that the owner never intended to make money or operate a successful business. All he talked about was 'going public' and how rich we (he) were going to be.
The "New Economy' taught me a lot. After working to two other companies with the same business model I now work for an 'Old Economy' business that actually believes in making a profit, serving it customers and taking care of it employees. There is no IPO in sight for this company and that's fine with me.
I'll take a steady paycheck today instead of the promise of stock pay offs tomorrow.
it's funny looking through old editions of Wired. The first few issue I have, back when Doom 1 was becomming mainstream popular and BBS's still thrived, the page count was pretty low compared to the following years. Around 1997, the pages were crammed with all kinds of craploads of advertising and the magazine was about twice as thick, and less interesting. I stopped subscribing then, and now I only pick up a copy whenever I am at an airport. It seems the page count is back to it's early days. What my point is, i don't know. Maybe just slightly defending Wired. The were able to adapt with the time, sucking in advertising revenue when it was possible, but still being able to slim down after the boom->bust. Though at the cost of losing the devotion of a few readers, like myself. I wonder if they still have their Wired stock index... i think it's value was like $2M at the time i stopped subscribing. It'd be interesting to see how their investor managed the bust.
If you couldn't explain how your .com business leveraged that 'paradigm shift'[1], then your .com business was going to be titsup.com real soon.
Justin.
[1] First time in ages that phrase has been used correctly.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Nothing beats the 17th century tulipmania . The power of human greed is always amazing.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Like economists and journalistic 'experts'.
Think about it, folks. If such people knew as much about economics as they thought they knew, they'd be on a yacht, not in a TV studio.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
You might want to have a look at Manias, Panics and Crashes by Kindleberger (ISBN: 0471389455). I thought it lended some insight to the process, although from a broader context. It has nothing to do with the latest crash, of course, but looks at financial irrationality.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
... is that self employment is the safest way to build a career. Why? The fundamental unit of trust is another person, not another company. As self-employed, I've insulated myself from most, if not all, of the stupid crap that companies do. While I have friends who have been laid off and rehired several times, I'm now for the first time confident in my financial future because I have a list of clients who all really need my services. They now trust me to get the work done. I trust them to pay on time. And that (to me) is worth more than a fat 401k because in ten years my work will be inflation-adjusted and grows with my clients (all of whom have been selected in part because they are likely to grow and already have a good pattern of it.)
And when I get ready to hire? The number one thing I'll be looking for on those resumes is a history of self-reliance and individual responsibility. There are a lot of professional committee-manipulators out there who like their comfortable BigCorp positions, and good for them. I'm confident that in twenty years, when we both look back and to see where we stand, my contributions to the world will be both worthwhile and significant.
Really, it all boils down to trust. That's what underlies the economic viability of open source: you're dealing with people and standardized network protocols and not organizational entities or proprietary lockin.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Nor is the phenomenon necessarily new - didn't the roughly the same thing happen around the turn of the (last) century with the automotive industry? I remember reading somewhere that hundreds (if not thousands) of automobile companies were formed and went bust in a matter of years, taking lots of investors' money with them.
THINK
Interesting topic, though I would characterize Fast Company as the "Cosmo" of tech/business publications. I found some of the articles non-researched, ill-conceived and sophmoric. In one section Fast Company continues to propagate the myth that Al Gore claimed he 'invented the Internet'.
I was one of the folks who stood around scratching his head at the explosion of IPOs for "dot coms" that had no legs to stand on. Why the imposion occurred shouldn't have surprised anyone who was paying attention, but it played on many peoples' sense of greed at the expense of their common sense.
I was one of the people who was there in the early days with technology and services that were way ahead of their time. OTOH, I was one of those that didn't run out, sign up a bunch of pimply-faced MBAs for a management team and then rush to do an IPO. Today, my company is far from the largest, but we're very stable and have a solid client base. I don't have a personal helocopter, but I did get my small slice of the dot-com pie when I sold a domain I registered in 1994 for an insane amount of money. That was exciting and depressing at the same time. It wasn't what I ever imagined would be one of the big payoffs relative to what we were doing. I suspect there may have been at least a few other companies who really wanted to build an honest solid net-based business model, that were overshadowed by the parade of spineless, over-hyped dot-coms run by people who perhaps a month before were selling life insurance.
There was some grave apprehension "selling out" at the time, like I was going to lose what I had worked on for three years. Also, I was making low six figures on advertising on the site over the past three years, so I was worried that I might be cashing out when I could have had continued money for years on end... of course the DOT COM crash allayed those concerns. But when the company that bought it went under, well, it was like, "There goes three years of my life." But I rationalize it by saying, "It's like I was paid $350k" for those three years, way more than I would have been making in industry.
But should I have hung on to the site, and not sold out? Yes, the money I was making prior to the crash would have curtailed in a major way, but advertising is picking up again today. Granted, it's not back up to where it was pre-2000, but it's gaining steam.
For example, there was (and still is) clear preferrential allocation of shares, thereby allowing only a select few to gain the benefits of an IPO. What we need is non-preferrential allocation of shares, akin to what Bill Hambrecht is doing with the OpenIPO system.
Nonetheless, the (historical) "new economy" was a lot more riskier than the "old economy", not less. There is a lot more reliance on innovation and high-risk investments to drive growth, which is great when the innovations work out in the long run. However, when big gambles, such as the dotcoms, fail to pay off (eg: no revenues, or costs exceeding profits), then the whole economy suffers.
This is likely the largest mistake that investors made. They failed to understand the high-volatility nature of the "new economy", and took far greater risks than they should. They failed to realize that by investing in new IPO's, they were effectively taking the same risks that venture capitalists do.
I think you're right, but that's because your analysis of the spam problem is on the "defensive" side (adding anti-spam this and that to our own systems). The solution isn't "defensive", it's "offensive". We need a new, different email system all together. I'd propose that instead of trying to re-work our existing system, we should write a new system and allow admins to add that to their servers, then allow for new email clients to be written & tested, then finally allow users to switch over to the new system, thus leaving the older one in place and more abandoned as each day passes. Eventually, we'd all be on a new system that would not allow such things like spam. Foreign countries with open relays would have no choice but to follow through otherwise their emails will constantly be rejected by the new system. Yeah, that's a little vague, but I think a newer system that doesn't accept unknown email is the way to go, and offering a transition phase will certainly help out the best instead of just jumping right in.
"Not the Earth!!! That's where I keep all my stuff!!!" - The Tick
Comparing how much different households pay in taxes by looking only at the federal income tax is like contrasting how much food people consume by counting only their breakfasts. To see who pays what, we need to look at the entire tax system, not one component in isolation.
In our federal system, households pay taxes to the federal government, state governments and local governments. As we broaden the scope from the federal income tax to include the rest of the federal tax system along with state and local taxes, the tax burden shifts more and more to the middle and the bottom.
In fact, for the bottom 80 percent of households, personal income tax is only 28 percent of their federal tax burden, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. The payroll tax for this group is more than twice as large, representing 59 percent of their federal tax burden. At the top of the income distribution, in contrast, the 20 percent of households with the highest incomes pay 61 percent of their federal taxes as personal income taxes while payroll taxes take up only 26 percent.
(from http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/7392)
NB: the parent post is just more evidence that Libertarian propaganda on slashdot gets auto-modded upward
from http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/7392
The lesson I learned is IT changes in the blink of an eye. One year theres a shortage in networking, the next a major surplus. One year programmers get paid 60k, 5 years from now probably 1/2 that. The lesson I'm taking from this is to pay off my house early and save everything I can. My job in IT may not exist in 10 years.
Worked for a CEO who spent most of his time bashing Microsoft, instead of running a business. He claimed to be a victim of Microsoft's evil business practices. He ridiculed other dot coms for being mere hypes. In the end, fake business, accounting scandal, CFO bailed right before the fallout (Fastow?!), COO fired and under FBI investigation (scapegoat?!), company collapsed, $400 million wasted, CEO ousted. The ex-CEO, $30 million dollor richer for running a company into ground, is still bashing Microsoft, at least this time he can't blame Microsoft for his business failure. Lesson: a lot of anti-Microsoft heros are human scums.
Invent and create are really two different things. Al Gore did in fact sponser the legislation to create the internet. And that's all he ever claimed. Back in the 80s when he did that, he was the only guy on capital hill who really did "get it" about technology. To try to twist that to "invent" is just stupid. Did Eisenhower "invent" the interstate highway system. No, but he did ask Congress to pass the legislation to create it - and then he signed the bill.
Tim Berners Lee invented HTML and HTTP. That's not the internet. Without HTTP there is still FTP, Gopher, Telnet, and a jillion other internet protocols.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score