Dot.com to Dot.bomb

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In class, we talked about the dot com boom of the 90s. This was a period of time mostly between 1995 and 2000 about many software companies that gathered large amounts of investors and spent way too much money (garnering net losses to their finances) trying to get virtual real estate. Our instructor brought up "Content is King" which was a phrase that was used pretty widely around media distribution websites in the 90s. This was something that a lot of companies followed to garner their investments and profits. It's similar to other companies over-spending on advertisements where their philosophy was "get big fast" to get funding. It seemed to me like a lot of snake oil, but that may have been the nature of the market at the time. There were a lot of novel ideas that came through, but our demonstration really nailed it home.

In class, our instructor brought a bunch of plastic toy dinosaurs. These toys were used to represent the companies of the time that just couldn't adapt and fell out or were bought up. A few of them are recognizable, like AOL and CompuServe. They provided services that didn't evolve and keep up with others like Yahoo. In fact, by the end of the dot com boom, Yahoo had overtaken these giants. I think this demonstration was important to emphasize that keeping market research relevant and leading the path of a company is how to not only stay relevant and sustainable but also grow and thrive. As technology grows and interests change, sustaining a business is definitely a full-time research job.

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