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Dot-Com Craze Peaked 10 Years Ago This Week
netbuzz writes "When the NASDAQ stock index hit its all-time high of 5,133 on March 10, 2000, it had more than doubled in a year and the dot-com bubble was already leaking in a big way. A week later the NASDAQ had fallen 9 percent. A year later it was below 2000. Gone were such poster children of the era as Pets.com, Kozmo, and — who could forget? — Whoopi Goldberg's Flooz. Here's a look back."
GoDaddy said these .info domains were the future! And they let me have one for the low low price of $1.99!
15,000 Flooz notes? Going cheap! I'll trade for a pets.com sock-puppet...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Who could forget Flooz? Me. Until right this instance. Thanks a lot, Slashdot, I was happier NOT remembering!
Okay on the list they have go.com as #8 biggest flop. I go to www.go.com and sure enough it looks like I just typed in the wrong URL and got some domain parking crap. And yet, on Alexa it's ranked 15th in the United States. Is Alexa horribly flawed or what is going on with www.go.com? How does a site that looks like that still rank number 15 in the United States? It's above Bing, CNN, Flickr and Wordpress. Huh?
My work here is dung.
Jobs where plentiful, signing bonuses common, stock options flowed like champagne......
I miss it.
Then company I worked for had an all hands meeting and then proceed to hand out unemployment forms.. We weren't even a dot com, but lack of investment killed them.
Like waking from a wonderful dream....
I forgot Whoopi Goldberg's Flooz until now
Let's sell dimes for a nickel and make it up in volume......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
How many people went from paper millionaires to "LOL..wut?" during this time?
The only good thing about the .bomb was that it separated the wheat from the chaff, in that all the little monkeyboys who thought getting their MCSE meant $85k+/yr are no longer in the industry, for the most part.
Basically, after the .bomb, the only people left were the good ones.
Sent from your iPad.
I still have, in my office, my pets.com sock puppet (still in box), the business cards for Petopia.com's CEO and CFO, my webvan box, and most precious, the receipt for 1 pack of lifesavers (5 flavor, $.48) delivered by Webvan for no-charge.
Ahh, those were good times...
Test your net with Netalyzr
Let's sell dimes for a nickel and make it up in volume......
dot.bank model: Let's sell dimes for a nickel and make it up in bailouts...
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Idiots like Harry Dent predicted that the NASDAQ would be 20,000 by now.
I hate being reminded of the dot com bubble. I had some good money in blue chip stocks and good mutual funds. I saw people making money like crazy all around me by investing in mutual funds that were heavily into tech stocks. So I took out a huge portion of my money and transferred it to the tech mutual funds and very soon after, the bubble burst. I had the misfortune of buying at the peak of the bubble and lost a very large amount of hard earned money. I don't know when I'll get over that.
Seems like we have these retrospectives on the dot-com bubble every 1-2 years - guess it's being driven by all the still-unemployed programmers.
I will mention (as I do in every dot-com retrospective thread) a bunch of my coworkers did their best to bankrupt Kozmo.com - unintentionally, of course. But with no minimum charge, it was the "go to" place whenever anyone was jonesing for a pint of Ben and Jerry's or even a Snickers bar.
Oh, and we can't have one of these threads without mentioning Eazel!
It's amazing how so many of these companies had no business plan whatsoever. It's REALLY amazing that, back then, some people were actually defending this practice! People who asked "what's the long term business plan" were ridiculed as being small minded or being guilty of outmoded thinking.
#DeleteChrome
Yeah it was good times. I was making more money than I had ever made, we had catered lunches in the office every day, and we got to go to events at the beach (it was an "extreme sports" website).
And then come monday we are told not to even report to work and that we'd be turned away if we did. Nice! Guess they thought we would loot the office or something. I wouldn't have minded taking one of those $500 Aeron chairs home...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
It's okay to sell products for less than what they cost you, because that will bring you lots of customers.
And really, its ok for the founders, they get lots of money. Look at YouTube.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
that everyone thought he/she was a software developer.
Note, Y2K was also adding gasoline to a fire.
Funny, the dot-com bubble still lives on: we are still marketing (i.e. exploiting) the same ideas generated from those days (1997-2000). It's 2010, same ideas, just different hardware (multicore cpus, gigabit networks, 3G/WiFi access). Times has changed, but have stayed the same.
I am a Ruby on Rails developer, and I AM A ROCK STAR. You think you know CRUD? Nuh uh! Me, RoR and ActiveRecord will kick your pathetic ass, because not only are we ROCK STARS, but we are CODE NINJAS.
See my fedora? Yeah, you do, bitch. It shows I'm real. I'm only 18 and haven't been to university, and my startup has no real customers, but me and AJAX will whoop your ass and make you worship DHH.
BRING IT.
For those of you who weren't there, see SFgirl, the web site for dot-com party girls.
Here's the dot-com party list for one week, ten years ago.
Typical party review: Mediaplex.com
Always one for a free night time invite into the SFMOMA, sfboy lined up with the rest of the VC bottom feeders and various webtrash last Wednesday evening to try his hand at the new phenomenon sweeping the city called "Let the Dot Coms Pay for Your Drinks". Inadequate staff with bad planning only worked to our advantage as CM slipped past the guestlist list like a bad desktop application business plan past an overzealous venture capitalist. Once inside sfboy experienced the largest spread of food yet to feed the frothing crowds shoved uncomfortably into a small room. Picture fields of ahi, buckets of fresh smoked salmon, oysters galore, cheese from every udder imaginable, sushi, dumplings, and chocolates, oh my! Add several ornate ice sculptures with internal martinis luges and you've got a real crowd pleaser! Hear, Hear, my stomach cries for Mediaplex! Take me in nightly, feed me completely, shower me with your VC cash!
Inside the museum itself child labor laws were overlooked at several dozen grommets flipped, spun and generally amused the masses with what appeared to be an orphanage filled with circus rats in training. I promptly notified the proper authorities.
Sfboy relunctantly admits that he has no idea what Mediaplex pretends to posses as a business model but he wishes them well in their attempts to create a virtual circus accompanied by a fine buffet.
Party Bill: $100,000
Clowns: 100
Professional Clowns: 25
Bars: 4
Party size: 650
I appreciate the non-FUD related articles that kdawson has been posting. Keep up the good work!
I spent the dot.com time in a bank auditing company. So I had a perfect view when the whole crap started to crash and burn.
Assessment of risk was completely off the bat. Everyone thought the internet is the next big thing. That really will take off. Everyone will buy everything online. Soon. Any time now. It's so much easier. And with a concentrated storage, logistics and delivery, you simply HAVE to be cheaper (overhead-wise) than everyone else, and computers are cheaper than brick-and-mortar stores, and no shop rents, and and and... it just MUST be a huge thing! And those loans, they will pay for themselves. Easily. They have no expense, you see? They can all invest it in their computers. And stuff. And what they need. And marketing is so big, it just HAS to take off like crazy!
Believe it or not, THAT was actually the reasoning behind the unsecured multi million loans! Everyone was so hyped up about how easily they should be able to recover their investments. Hell, NOT throwing money at them would have been so stupid because everyone else did it and you just can't stay out of it because then your revenue would be lower and nobody would give you money (sounds familiar? It reminds me a lot of the current "we had to do those high risk businesses because else we could not offer those insane interest rates and if we didn't, nobody would have invested with us... It's the same bull all over again).
What appearantly everyone failed (or refused) to see was that a lot of these people had little more than a pipe dream for a business plan and no experience with running a business whatsoever. We'll certainly hear a lot of stories of people who worked at dot.com businesses at the time. Tell me: These were startups, right? How many had expensive paid-by-company lunches or parties? What cars did your bosses drive, at company expense? Where was your office, and how was it furnished? What PR stunts did you stage?
That's not how you "invest" money. That's how you squander it. And that's what made the bubble burst.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I dunno. I see the same things today. Every little niche in the computing world seems to be filled at an ever-increasing speed. Often by 20-somethings that have nothing to lose. Nothing wrong with that. But I still can't see how they're all going to be successful. How many advertising social networking sites can we handle? The problem is, since the barriers to entry are so low, and there's always an ample supply of 20-somethings that can live on next-to-nothing, I see no end to it.
When you don't have a manufacturing sector, it's hard to create actual wealth. When corporate structures have co-opted your government into forcing you to compete with third world wages and shifted the tax burden from the richest to the middle class, it's impossible.
Hey, welcome to 18th Century France! I can't wait to see what happens next...
Sheesh. Either am I becoming an old man at 40, or time goes by so fast I don't notice between coding, women and booze ( not necessarily in that order, though ).
Sheesh.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Hmm. No mention of Mirror-Image Internet?
The parent company, Excelera.com took some $860 million out of the stock market after a $2 million investment. After their stock went from $1.40, through 3 or 4 splits, up to $142 (or thereabouts), based solely on the expectations for Mirror Image, the owners (Venture Capitalists) started selling like it was going out of style. Shortly afterward, the plummet started, and within 3 months that same stock was going for less than $40. 6 months later, Mirror Image was put through a 100,000 to 1 reverse split (still private stock), and all employees below the VP level were left with worthless stock option agreements. Even the VPs would never get right side up on their options.
Employees that were with MII when Excelera bought them were given Excelera options - or the promise of Excelera options. It took 2 years to get their paperwork - it came just after Excelera stock dropped back to $40, costing some employees over a million dollars. Last I heard, there were over 20 lawsuits lodged by employees, and more than a few from other companies that had been duped into investing directly into MII.
A year later, Excelera was delisted when their stock went below $1.
You do realize the US is close to bankrupt right? I would diversify fast if I were you...a good mix of international and US mutual funds would be good.
We Live in Public is a movie worth watching. The movie documentary follows Josh Harris, who became a dot com millionaire, he did some crazy art projects when he was rich, it then follows how he lost all his money and what he did afterwards. From IMDB:
On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web is having on our society as seen through the eyes of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of", visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner ("DIG!"), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives. Josh Harris, often called the "Warhol of the Web" through the infamous dot.com boom of the 1990's, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network and created his vision of the future, an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the millennium. He proved how in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including a six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public.
Most likely a shitty automated brokerage system that initiated a fire sale when he calculated the net earning of his NASDAQ stock over the first trimester of 1900... Sheeple panicked, history ensued. And they say the Y2K bug had no impact... Geee.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember being in London in 2000 attending a training course. It must have been late in the year, as it was after we'd moved offices that August.
Anyway whilst down in London I read a few of those free newspapers to pass the time, and couldn't believe how they were hyping stocks in all kinds of daft websites. Then there were the equally stupid adverts splashed all over the underground. One company in particular had bombarded the whole of the network whilst lavish adverts of for their service, whose entire mode of operation involved serious personal privacy breaches. It was obvious that a crash was looming.
... creating Photoshop mockups of advertisements in the late 1990s. I remember being in a bullpen with a bunch of underdressed young folk who did little but check the stock price obsessively. It was a strange time and I created more than a few Director-generated .exe screensavers.
To say nothing of the unorthodox eBay shop I set up, only to be shuttered by The Man.
Oh those heady days ...
Some of it was just pure greed from the developers end.
I recall a shop-by-phone company in Boston. You could order your groceries over the phone. They would send you a booklet to pick. They were in business for over 20 years before going bust. When I talked to one of the people working there (on my last order) it turned out that they had invested in an online store. Which worked great at first but the cost of running it was way more then the profits they made. It wasn't evident until it was too late.
while you're at it, why don't you give me a paper cut and pour lemon juice on it...
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
I do miss those days! Late 90's... 30-somethings were getting ST00Pid money from investors and spending it on shit like classic arcade games. Galaga, Ms Pacman, ... they easily sold for $1600 each. Now... I'm sitting on a Missile Command I can't even unload for $400. Other collectors are selling machines for half what they have into them (repairs/restoration costs).
IT project failures lose over $6e12/year worldwide.
This, of course, has little to do with the quality of programmers and if you think it does, then you're most likely an unemployed, childless white programmer suffering from age-related cognitive decline who has lived a life of sexual frustration.
Just die now and stop sharing your misery with the rest of the world in your psycho suicide attacks on the government.
Seastead this.
*sniff* Makes me want to pull out my stack of worthless stock options and wipe my ass with them, as I always said I would do.
My sig sucks.
Some of those same thinking people are giving "old and busted" vs "new hotness" advice when it comes to music or movies. They think technology be it the internet, or cheap software and computers somehow will make artists successful without understanding how to run a business, or that technology makes one talented, you just need the right kind.
This also means that it's the 10th anniversary of my first major investment: Putting a small wad of money in a tech-heavy mutual fund. Reader, it is I who precipitated the dot-com collapse, by my first foray into the market. Sorry about that.
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
Yes I remember the period. Just after the fear that was Y2K and the resulting infrastructure build-out the bubble brought. Then 9/11 and the bottom fell out of the economy and didn't really recover for several years.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Whoa... tens years of watching jenny cam and waiting for her to do it. I'm not counting the couple sessions of foreplay before the server crashed under a wave of voyeurs. This is kinda like the wait for fallout 3. When the game finally came out, I was too old to enjoy it. My tastes had changed. Now when Jenny finally does the act, she'll be too old for me to enjoy her.
"the only people left were the good ones"
That's a comforting myth people tell themselves. The reality is that IT/Software is susceptible to the economics of Greshams Law, which essentially means the incompetent and dishonest prosper while the competent and honest are punished.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law
True. How fortunate that the US is #1 in manufacturing, and vastly ahead of #2 (Japan) and very far ahead of #3 (China).
You know what the most important thing is for statistics? Context. Our manufacturing per capita consistently places us outside of the top 10. It's like people celebrating a US or Canadian women's hockey victory despite the fact that we have more players by a factor of a thousand. Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Germany outperform us in a number of areas. And I bet if you took entertainment out of the equation it would really be illuminating.
You also may want to know that the #2 economy (by GDP alone) is now China. It also just overtook Germany as the world's largest exporter (again, by pure GDP, not per capita).
And worse, Bill Clinton signed a larger tax cut for the rich than George Bush ever did...
Alright, now you're just full of shit, by income tax and by effective tax rates. Read the tax rates here. Top bracket under Bush is 35%. Top bracket under Clinton is 39.6%. Capital gains tax was cut from 20% to 15%. Income from dividends went from 35% to 15%. The Estate Tax was halved, and even completely nonexistent for one year (this year, I think). And that's why you hear the babbling heads screaming bloody murder about keeping the Bush Tax Cuts.
There's even an article in the Times from 2007. This shit is no secret. "Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/washington/08tax.html
And before you say a word about the richest paying the most taxes - OF COURSE. The top 1% of households hold more than 50% the assets. Why wouldn't they be paying most of the taxes?
If you have any other questions about reality, feel free to ask.
I'd keep chanting about how marvelously solid the America dollar is (must be).... while buying hard assets / resources from whoever would sell them to me in exchange for Junk America bonds.
But wait, that's exactly what China is doing.
End game?
Guess who ends up owning the hard assets... and guess who ends up owning "Intellectual Property".
I know which I'd rather own.
... and — who could forget? — Whoopi Goldberg's Flooz.
Myself, for one. I didn't think this would be memorable to anyone, let alone unforgettable.
... and then they built the supercollider.
My dim memories of the time was that Michael J. Saylor's MicroStrategy was going to datamine the present and pown the future. If I had heard of google by that time, I thought they were some obscure application that had to do with Macintoshes.
Their they're doing there hair.
where the U.S. government posted a budget surplus.
New Economic Perspectives
Yes there were idiotic businesses launched that should never have been, but ultimately what popped the DotCom bubble was the profound and fundamental shift from our government promoting investment into high tech (the Clinton years) and the monumental shift to promoting investment first in energy (oil, gas, and coal... remember Dubya flew to his campaign stops on an Enron jet), then real estate, and ultimately war (Mr. Cheney said we there were no good targets in Afghanistan... where the terrorists were... no easy way to get the oil there) so instead we started a war of convenience for our fearless leaders!
In California, I remember rolling black outs reeking havoc with the business of the company I worked for in 2001. All while Enron screwed with the Western U.S. and milked California for 18 billion dollars. Sure during the 90s Tech probably got an unfair amount of Government support. However, since then, it hasn't got the support it needs or deserves. Worse, interesting technologies and possibilities were obliterated needlessly. We all lost out, so many of my friends left tech, because for nearly 4 years, there simply wasn't the level of requisite work available to support the engineers that had previously existed.
Since then, Wall Street seems wholly dedicated to make 90% of America unemployed and unemployable. As business is forced by design to increase the revenue (often by shaving the labor pool), more and more is being done by fewer and fewer people. The term is "Jobless Recovery", and it seems to be the new reality presented to us by our corporate handlers. A different future would demand a radical shift in the way we now do things. From my point of view, it's seriously worth considering.
Unlike everyone who flooded money into underwater stock options and technology stocks, my friends and I invested heavily into the college funds of exotic dancers (sure you're just doing this to pay for college...) and the children of many of the bartenders in our town. At the end of the day, I have about the same to show for it as the people who lost the proverbial farm as their 401k's went on a roller coaster ride from hell, but had one hell of a time getting there!
Aww shutup!
Nuff Said.
Oh NO! We're outside the top 10! Clear we "don't have a manufacturing sector" as you've said.
Who's "full of shit", now?
That's not even remote what I said. I said Clinton gave them a bigger tax cut. Bush's tax cuts, on TOP of Clintons tax cuts, of course puts Bush's rate lower, because he came after.
And I quote:
Your version of "reality" is about as accurate as Fox News', just swinging to the left.
Try again, without the flagrant ignorance and blinding bias.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Oh NO! We're outside the top 10! Clear we "don't have a manufacturing sector" as you've said.
Who's "full of shit", now?
Manufacturing per GDP #75
Exports per GDP #179
That's not even remote what I said. I said Clinton gave them a bigger tax cut. Bush's tax cuts, on TOP of Clintons tax cuts, of course puts Bush's rate lower, because he came after.
Effective Federal Tax Rates
Top 1%
1988: 29.7
1992: 30.6
1996: 36.0
2000: 33.0
2004: 31.4
2006: 31.2
Top 10%
1988: 26.7
1992: 26.9
1996: 30.1
2000: 29.6
2004: 27.1
2006: 27.5
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=456
And I quote: DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Oooh! Look what else he said!
Well, this is one-- this is a great irony. George Bush owes almost his entire fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket and into the use of eminent domain laws to essentially legally cheat other people out of their land for less than it was worth to enrich him and his fellow investors...
One of the key sources I quote is a prominent Republican lawyer married to a United States senator who is the expert in Texas on municipal finance. The subsidy, he says, is $202.5 million. And Bush and his partners captured about 168 million of it.
Anecdotes are awesome... but I prefer the CBO's statistical analysis. Johnston may be right about the top 400 households, but I was unable to find any real data on that.
Such glorious days were they! When every computer science diploma had an "Endorse Here" line on the back to cash at the bank. When Pets.com simply couldn't fail. When Red Hat would destroy Microsoft -- "Is Linux ready for the desktop?" -- that headline was actually new (and exciting). When 5-digit /. user ids were extremely large values. Alice and Bill were still together, and in print. What's better: Alta Vista or Lycos? AOL was called America Online ("The future: now available"), but we remember CompuServe and GEnie and Prodigy and Delphi.
And let me tell you something: Java is going to change the world!