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.
Nothing beats the 17th century tulipmania . The power of human greed is always amazing.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
... 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
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.