dot-com-bubble 24

It’s a flat world after all. Thomas Freidman on Globalization, Bangalore, … Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. ...

i2 may have to delist. And delisting may be good for them.

Greenspan’s defence. On why he couldn’t have raised interest rates earlier and prevented the bubble.

Obituary: Industry Standard, Excite@Home, Exodus. Long live the Internet.

DotComDoom.com – about the demise of dot-coms. News links.

A $45 billion writedown from JDS Uniphase. The largest ever loss in corporate history.

Feed is dead. Suck is dead. Thankfully, Plastic is alive. Demise of a Net Magazine.

Carl Steadman’s book, NetMogul, is evolving online. It’s about dot-com startups. What I liked best was the way the book has been formatted online.

With the Internet economy booming despite the collapse of dot-coms, the OECD countries are getting ready to tax the Internet.

Fucked company reports that X-Drive.com is likely to lay off people. Given their accuracy, I’d recommend anyone having files on X-Drive make backups in the near future.

Dot-coms go bust, but e-commerce initiatives in companies still thrive.

With all these people getting fired, TheStandard has come out with an ex-Exec tracker. Brilliant!

More layoffs: AT&T, News Corp, Gateway and Motorola. But the find of the day is TheStandard’s layoff tracker.

Recession. Daimler Chrysler slashes 26,000 jobs. Disney cuts 400. Amazon may have cut 20%. It isn’t nice (1 2). But dot-coms might still do well, since software, labour and real-estate costs will start falling?

Recession? GM shuts 14 plants. Boeing: 1 plant. AMC: 548 theatres. WorldCom lays of 10-15%. HP: 2%. Delphi & Visteon: 10,300. Lucent: 10,000. Sara Lee: 7,000. JC Penney: 5,000. AOL: 2,000.

More deaths. Chemdex, the B2B chemical market. Send.com, the gift store. Musicmaker, the CD-burner. Foodline, the restuarant agent.

Didn’t know dot-coms had unions. Amazon does. A reaction to the layoffs in dot-coms?

Now Yahoo! will charge a fee for auctions. No more free PCs. No more free ISPs. No more ad revenues. No more free auctions. The trend is clear. Pay! Unfortunately, they’ll also monitor what’s being sold – an indication that country-specific legal barriers are creeping into the Internet.

Finance.com has shut down. Desktop.com too. NetZero. And the biggest of all: Pets.com (chart). This is more the trend than exception. People who had accounts on these? Tough luck! That’s one reason to stick to big players like Yahoo or Microsoft.

Fortune has a 6-part post-mortem of dot-coms. In contrast, the FTC lists the top ten ways to make a quick-buck on the Internet – the dot cons.

The Economist has an article on The failure of new media – about how the Internet’s a disappointment. In fact they have lots of articles on the Internet.

What’s more of a rage than profitable dot-coms? Bankrupt dot-coms, as listed by dotcomfailures, startupfailures, and fuckedcompany. Scepticism’s gone far enough to make this web economy bullshit generator a great hit.

There’s a whole series of articles on Umashankar Dikshit – a Silicon Valley pujari. Not a bad idea – epujari.com (which incidentally is on sale.) Following the articles on Rediff and USA Today, there’s this really funny piece. Now I’ve heard everything. The San Francisco Chronicle reported some weeks ago that a Hindu priest in Silicon Valley called Umashankar Dixit is in great demand to perform Lakshmi poojas when e-commerce startups are launched by Indians, as an increasing number are. Mr. Dixit says modestly that he is considered a ’lucky hand’ because his God is Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. He – Mr. Dixit that is, not Ganesha – has been compensated in cash and stock options by several startups and says he has already done very well from the IPOs of successful companies like Exodus Communications. Rediff’s US edition and USA Today have since come up with their own breathless takes on Mr. Dixit, reporting among other things that he spends an hour every morning, presumably just after sandhyavandanam, on the Internet monitoring the financial markets. ...

The Internet Law Journal has a lot of stuff on legal issues on the Net. It’s going to come in handy for our dot-com project. So is dotcomfailures.com, which has details on failing dot-coms.