Get me that permafailure Krugman on the horn!
"THIS TIME IT'S ALL DIFFERENT!!"
No, I don't think so.
Afterwards:
"NO-ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED" etc. etc.
We're now at dot-com bubble levels of investment in Silicon Valley, according to the latest stats, raising the specter of another tech crash. PricewaterhouseCoopers' MoneyTree report, which tracks venture capital investment across the US, has announced (though not yet published) its Q4 2014 results, and revealed that in the …
One of the things about the so-called "dot-com bust" that everyone seems to forget is that it came right after the Y2K panic. A lot of companies had blown their IT wad in preventing Y2K problems, and a lot of that included investing in shiny new hardware and software. After Jan. 1, 2000, they felt they had to cut back on new investments and enjoy the fruits of that pre-December 31, 1999 feeding frenzy. When nobody is buying, sellers aren't making much money... especially those who have depended (or gotten used to) huge volumes of sales.
This time around we haven't had the Y2K impetus driving even the most non-tech companies to upgrade their technology.
You might be right... from the Urban Dictionary: deth is not a retarted way to spell death, it is a name used to measure radiation (like meters, volts and shizzle), megadeth is 1000000 deth =/
and is also a pun on death, making the name rugged and cool.
"whoa the radiation is high in here, its above 100000000000 deth"
1. We now have the concept of "to big to fail". Just like with banks, we will have Internet companies which are seen as integral to the structure of what governments will claim to be the Internet. One example might be Facebook. There are whole companies which base their business model around Facebook, if it is gone they are gone.
2. There will be little left from that bubble. The first bubble brought us loads of glass lying in the ground. This and cheap used equipment from failed companies made it easy for new companies to get a head start. One example is Cogent. The investments we have now mostly go into marketing. The value of Facebook or Flickr or whatever doesn't come from anything substantial, but from brands and the hope that one day they can turn their user data into money.
One of the things to remember about the differences between 1999 and 2015 is the way these new breed of Internet startups get online. Before, it meant a huge fixed cost of renting space in a data center, and telcos/colo centers geared up to do this. Now it's almost all hosted on AWS/Azure/some other public cloud. The last bust triggered a huge bankruptcy bonanza on eBay for equipment. Now, it's going to trigger a price war between the public cloud providers who are going to be fighting to give away that overcapacity.
8/10 Venture Capitalists (no matter what their size) know sweet FA about the business their money goes into. It's all generally a case of recommendation by others, copying others or taking a punt in the hope one several comes up trumps.
I've witnessed this in the channel, those heady days of dotcom and more recently with the arrival of cloud based technology, mobility and wearable tech.