Dot.com to Dot.Bomb

This is a breakdown of the Dot.com to Dot.Bomb years. According to our professor it can be separated into 5 stages – An innocent beginning, Boom!!, Insanity!!!, Bust!, and the crawl back to sanity. Before the world wide web, Tim Burnes laid out 2 uses for the web. HTML had to be created and standards had to be developed such as HTTP. Apple computers came out in 1984 which in turn led to computers becoming ubiquitous and people wanted to connect them. Big systems were coming out of the woodwork and at the time were heavy hitters all their own. Prodigy, a private network, had 1.1 million users and was owned by Sears and IBM, Compuserve, which was owned by H&R Block, had 1 million users, Genie, which was owned by General Electric, has 200,000 users, AOL, which was using a CD distribution strategy, gained a large user base, and Delphi, another service, had 100,000 users. This was not to last though.

It began in 1994 when Microsoft used Compuserve to localize programs to other regions. Free range media was allowed use by corporations. DealerNet was one such example of an extremely successful website. At the International Web Conference that year, Tim Burnes delivered a paper describing the potential of the WWW. There was also another individual who proposed that there should be 2 different versions of the WWW – one for businesses and one for science. Cole and Weber were 2 individuals at the time who worked together on web advertising and Mosaic was an alternative to using Internet Explorer.

During the years of 1995 to 1997 the Boom!! Stage occurred. Netscape became the browser leader worth $1 billion, the web became a market, and PathFinder was going to be a compilation of online magazines. Burnes was contacted by Advertising Age magazine about free range media’s advertising strategy. Prodigy rose and fell in the course of that time, Compuserve purchased Spry for $120 million, Yahoo launched and became big, Amazon aimed to be the largest bookstore (causing Barnes and Noble to throw a fit), and the USWeb became a large web development company.

In 1997 the Insanity!! Stage occurred. AOL bought Compuserve, InfoSpace went public, Burn Rate was written, and the InterNet Bubble was published. This led to the next stage, which was Bust. Many .com companies advertised on the SuperBowl, Pets.com went bust, the stock market made a downturn, layoffs occurred in many .com companies, and many more companies fell alongside them.

Over the course of the following years the businesses have crawled back from the ashes of defeat and new ones have formed, but the introduction of the WWW has changed business forever. The big change was going from an Industrial Age economy to a computer age economy. Some could shoulder the pain, but most were unable to bear the burden. In essence, the strong consume the weak, though that is just what happens when a large upheaval of change takes place. I didn’t honestly notice these changes that easily even though this occurred during my childhood years, but some of the ramifications that came from this and some of the technologies used back then that aren’t used now were things I was familiar with.