Entries tagged “bubble”

Another great Wall Street Journal online debate: Is 'Web 2.0' Another Bubble? David Hornik and Todd Dagres' excellent back-and-forth was unfortunately overshadowed by the dead week between Christmas and New Year's, but it's well worth the read.

Predictably, I think they're both right. David's strongest point was towards the middle:

I think that you aren't giving Web 2.0 entrepreneurs enough credit. Sure, there are some "me too" sites out there. There always are. But the amount of rapid innovation in online services has been staggering -- from Skype to Digg to Six Apart to YouTube to Flickr to Facebook... The list goes on. They aren't microprocessor companies with years of patent-protected intellectual property. On the other hand, they are innovating around things that matter to consumers today. And I believe they are being appropriately valued, not just by potential acquirers but by the consumers themselves.

Or, "Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt".

Following up on the discussion about Web 2.0 from last week, the only thing as glaring as who was missing from the room was the talk of a new bubble. I can't even count how many blog posts and skeptical articles I read referring to Bubble 2.0.

I don't really have an opinion either way if there's another bubble inflating right now, but I think it's interesting to take a look at the companies that have already flipped and to compare them to the acquisitions after the deflation of the Web 1.0 bubble. Keep in mind, during the pre-Y2K bubble, the goal was to IPO and become fabulously wealthy; Indeed, being "built to flip" was a near-epithet five years ago. (Whatever happened to that Pyra company, anyway?)