"it was the realization that with the internet you could reach anyone on the planet that caused people to lose their minds. Companies conflated possibility with reality."
"but this time it is driven by the combination of the internet and smartphones. Not only can you get to billions of people, the optimists excitedly tells themselves, but you can get to them all the time on a device they carry around with them"
I don't think the two are really comparable in that sense. In the former, saw the possibility of reaching billions of people but never managed to actually achieve it. In the latter, the possibility of reaching billions of people on devices they carry with them actually has been achieved. The problem is not that the dream of reaching so many people still fails in reality, but simply that reaching lots of people has never been enough in and of itself. The money was never there either now or in the previous bubble, but last time everyone fell at the first hurdle so they didn't even notice the second one that we've now reached.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
