Dot.com to Dot bomb

     Andrew gave a lecture on the Dot Com bubble. In the mid to late 1990s, there was an unprecedented amount of an excitement in the Internet companies that rose. People thought it was a boom without end.

    Andrew used dinosaurs as an analogy to describe the dominant Internet companies in the era - Compserv,  Pets.com, Yahoo. He used dinosaurs because they were these strong creatures that roamed the Earth and no one dared to challenge them. Unfortunately, like dinosaurs, these companies failed to adapt to the significant changes(for Dinosaurs, asteroid ahead of them and perished.

The asteroid in this case was an incoming bubble. Because of all the excitement, so much money than what these Internet companies were actually worth(if you do DCF  of future revenues) was being put in and later when the bubble burst, people were in a panic to sell. This actually reminded of my purchase of the new Star Wars battlefront game. Due to all the hype around the Force Awakens, many people(including me) bought the entire game($60) without playing it first. We put so much hype into the game. The game itself lacked a single player campaign mode, droids, and had few maps compared to the previous Battlefront games.

     There were some dinosaurs that adapted to survive. Andrew talked about Yahoo as the exception. Yahoo would be the crocodile in the dinosaurs analogy. One of the things I took away was that to survive in the economy, you need to willing to adapt. As software engineers, were taught that you need to constantly learn new frameworks and technologies or your skills will be obsolete.  er