Dot.com to Dot.Bomb Presentation

After waiting the entire quarter for it, at last the much anticipated event had finally arrived: we got to watch Andrew play with plastic dinosaurs (I do have to wonder, which one of his children he took them from :)). Although this bit of humor was what I best remembered this presentation by, I found the subject matter very interesting as well.

I liked how the dinosaurs were used to represent Prodigy, CompuServ, Genie, AOL, and Delphi. They truly are dinosaurs, now extinct, existing only in our memories; relics of the past. Overall, it was a very appopriate example, despite the humor involved in it.

I found it amazing how the adoption of the Internet coincided in the absolute explosion of businesses, due to the Internet being a powerful e-commerce medium. The dot-com boom was literally a time when a company could see their stock price shoot through the roof, by simply adding an "e-" prefix to their name and/or adding a ".com" to the end of their name.

Venture capitalists were almost giving out money, only to have their investments go bust in early 2000. It's obsurd to think that a company that was showing absolutely no profit, but infact the exact opposite--enormous losses, would be able to go up for huge IPO, and that the venture capitalists would buy into this all. What were they thinking?!?!

Unfortunately, my family felt the full effect of the dot-com bubble busting as my mom, an Egghead.com manager at the time, was laid off, joining the "Fried Eggs" group as it was coined at the time.

Despite all of the depairity, there were some bright spots that survived the dot-com bubble bust, namely Amazon.com and Google, the latter of which seems bent on world domination. Muwhahaha!!!