Shaking Off The Dot Com Hangover

Overhype

from the that-took-quite-a-while dept

After the dot com bubble popped, many people seemed too distraught to bother looking at what actually happened and what lessons could be learned. It’s only now, years later, that things are on the upswing again that some people are willing to turn back and look at what actually happened. An anonymous reader submits a story from the new Fast Company magazine talking about lessons learned from the dot com era, and it’s not that bad. They basically admit that many of the things that people said during the boom weren’t completely wrong – but were either taken too far or looked at in isolation, ignoring the unintended consequences of actions. Along with the article are a series of sidebars, some of which are interesting. In a where are they now piece, they have a great description of Marc Andreessen’s current company (“delivers some sort of solution to some sort of enterprise”) and in a short timeline of the bubble they willingly admit that, just as the bubble was imploding: “Fast Company urges being fast in all things. Fast to hire! Fast to partner! Fast to spend. We leave out “Fast to go bust!”” Of course, as other recent posts here have shown, sometimes it seems that people didn’t learn anything at all. Sometimes, it’s new people making the same old mistakes, but there are plenty of people who made these mistakes already and appear to be doing so again.