Comments on: Boom or Bloom?

By: Zopa blog

Zopa blog — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:46:29 +0000

[...] was quite a lot of coverage on the (in the?) blogosphere, you can read a few pieces here, here, here and there, and the consensus seemed to be that there wasn’t in fact another [...]

By: Ian Delaney

Ian Delaney — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 18:09:18 +0000

Rosie – you may well be right. I am old and worn and probably ‘don’t get it’.

OTOH, I’m not sure age has anything to do with this. As I understand it, journalism students are among the top sceptics about citizen journalism, not the ‘old timers’ you might expect.

By: Rosie Sherry

Rosie Sherry — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:25:57 +0000

I think there is an important point to consider here. We now have the ‘digital natives’ who are essentially people who grew up within the web era. (Born from 1984 – people say).

Whilst you may not envision yourself using a video mobile phone much of the younger will be likely to adopt this or other new technologies without hesitation. So it could just be a matter of time?

By: Bob Boydston

Bob Boydston — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 21:27:46 +0000

I’m sure if you talk to Trump, he would say that entrepreneurialism is alive and breathing, but what is conceived as entrepreneurialism by him is simple “owning a business.” And although there is considerable risk in any venture, only in the last few years have we begun to see VC capital entering the software field so vigorously. And it seems to mirror later 17th and 18th centuries…doesn’t it?

By: Ian Delaney

Ian Delaney — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 20:27:37 +0000

Historically, there was the Dutch tulip bulb bubble and the South Sea bubble. Both are often cited as analogous to the dotcom bubble. In both cases, something that wasn’t worth very much became valued very highly because of hype.

In many cases, I have to blame greed for these latter-day bubbles such as the oil boom & bust you cite. Unfortunately, though, we’re not necessarily, individually, in control of deciding to fall for these things. Who’s to say, for example, whether my pension fund or savings trust decided to buy oil at $84 or Google stocks at a similar value?

Back to the historical examples. Isn’t it interesting that they’re both from the C17th/C18th when the entrepreneurial class was born? And that there are no more recent examples? The re-emergence of entrepreneurialism as the new rock’n'roll over the last ten years is intriguigingly analogous.

By: Bob Boydston

Bob Boydston — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 19:14:02 +0000

One panelist seems to feel that if we are questioning whether we are in a bubble that we cannot be in one. But, didn’t we just leave a huge dotcom boom and bust era? And aren’t investors wary of the true value of any new web-based endeavor (be the Web2.0 or not)? I don’t buy the argument that if we question whether we are in a bubble that we cannot be in one. But, the question remains, “are we in a bubble?”

Well, what are the dynamics of a bubble? Are bubbles only found in web-based environments? Are there other bubbles that can inform us? First, let’s look at the dotcom bubble. What made it fall? Was it the proliferation of websites? Was it that commerce was not being done on the web? No, it was that investors made imprudent decisions on websites of dubious value. The ROI was not well evaluated and, in many cases, never delivered. So, the dotcom bubble was caused by investors…not by those who were creating websites.

Recently, I was reading about the speculative oil market. Oil reached over $84 per barrel. Many bought at that frenzied rate and now are paying for it as the value of oil now has plummeted to $54 a barrel. Speculation is the culprit.

Is that happening in the Web 2.0 world? TechCrunch writes about its “DeadPool” of companies (websites) that got funded and fizzled. For each of those companies, they were on a bubble. But, are we seeing an increased rate in failures. I think not.

In the end, a bubble is precipitated by a rate increase in failures. I am not seeing that right now.