A Decade on from the Bursting of the Dotcom Bubble

According to some publications, today marks the tenth anniversary of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, when the price of tech stocks began to tumble and many companies went under.

A quick look in the archives reminds us that business and computing publications were aware of the impending crash: this article in Maclean's, 24 January 2000, says

...firms whose stock is overvalued because of the current mania for all things Internet should use those shares as currency to buy other companies while they still can. Otherwise, there's a risk they may "lose it" if and when the Internet bubble bursts and stocks like eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon.com return to earth.

Of course, we know that all three of these companies survived the crash and have gone on to be three of the most stable names in the era of Web 2.0. Other companies were not so long-lived. Despite the headline "No Bubbles Bursting Here", this article from Advertising Age, November 6, 2000, lists several information-exchange websites that no longer exist, had their domain names bought out by other companies, or exist in a completely different form today.

Although some articles, such as "The Next Bubble", from Technology Review, July/August 2008, suggest that "to the individuals who lived through the last Web bubble, this year's Web 2.0 ventures seem painfully reminiscent of the online companies of 2000", others take the view expressed in the name of an article from Computerworld, March 26, 2007, that "Consumer Demand Should Prevent Web 2.0 Bubble, Say Users, Analysts".

The articles cited and quoted in this post can all be located very easily in Omnifile Full Text, either the Mega Edition or the Select Edition.