New at Reason

June 28, 2004

Doug Henwood performs an autopsy on the dotcom boom; Charles Oliver gives a second opinion.

Comments

|6.28.04 @ 9:34AM|#

As someone who worked through the dot com bubble crash, depression, and now, hopefully, hopefully, a slight resurgence, I would love to have the questions Oliver poses answered.

One I have is--if the dot coms were killed by technology people getting over their heads in business, then how do you explain the tendency of VC firms to oust everybody but a nominal CEO and proceed to up the burn rates while wildly changing business plans? I think the enthusiasm and complete lack of understanding or intuition about technology by financiers and business managers has more to do with the overhype and the crash.

George Gilder and Esther Dyson are interesting people but they're not gearheads. Their market wasn't tech types, but people with more money in their clothes and hair than hanging off their belts. It's not as if some programmer broke into Wall Street's computers and made everybody invest in pet food over the internet.

Ah well. Fortunately my primary question in my second round of dot-com interviews was, "Are you financed from revenue?"

|6.28.04 @ 11:08AM|#

What does "productivity growth" in "wholesale and retail trade and security and commodity brokerages" even mean?

Call centers with higher hit rates? The check you write clears your account sooner? Is there any way the above phenomenon actually translates into more money circulating throught the economy?