<i>That was over ten years ago. For context, Mark Zuckerberg was all of sixteen when the original web bubble popped.</i><p><i>Yes, you will have incredibly lucrative job offers in this bubble. That's the easy part. As Startup.com and Code Rush illustrate, the hard part is figuring out why you are working all those long hours.</i><p>If this is supposed to some kind of <i>reminder</i> as to what <i>we're</i> doing with our lives, it's not going to work to stop a bubble. Those who will work those long hours this time aren't old enough to have lived through it the first time. The people who were the foot soldiers of the bubble ten years ago are not the ones who are going to be the foot soldiers in the next bubble: I seriously doubt anyone who worked the long hours ten years ago is going to consciously make a choice to do so again. It's not just that our collective memory is short, it's that there are so many new, young, impressionable, minds with no memory to influence their decisions.
Perhaps I'm being cynical, but I suspect that part of the reason Facebook's recent investors have accepted such a ridiculous valuation is that they expect the everday ubiquity of Facebook to drive a flood of dumb money into Facebook after the inevitable IPO.
Like a lot of Coding Horror articles, there's less here than meets the eye. Unless I am missing some subtle subtext, the content is basically "Netscape did some cool things, back in the day", to which those of us over a certain age can only reply "No duh."<p>A deeper analysis of the Netscape case would be a fascinating read. This, however, isn't it.
This onion article is now more relevant than ever:<p><a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation-demands-new-bubble-to-inve,2486/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation-dem...</a>
It seems to me there is a fundamental difference between today's market and the dotcom bubble. Right now, sites with ridiculous valuations actually provide a great deal of value. Facebook has >500,000,000 people using it and makes a great deal of money. Groupon also makes a great deal of money. Google too.<p>Sure, it seems like we might be in a bubble, but at the same time things seem different.
What are they eating unhealthy in that movie! Boxes full of sugary donuts, cream cakes, piles of empty Coke bottles. I hope that nowadays they serve better food at those kind of companies.
With all of the printing of money going on and no other sound investments around to absorb it, its no wonder another bubble is developing. You literally cannot even safely buy municipal bonds these days. So anything that has been growing will get bubbled. Until, of course, it cannot be bubbled no more and an extreme lack of people willing to overpay arrives.
Are tech bubbles all that bad? They are periods of economic optimism where money flows into tech companies furthering R&D and technological growth in a society. In the long run this is a <i>very</i> good thing. Where would we be now if it weren't for the last bubble, or the one before that?
The tick lines on the graph shown are drawn in an exponentially decreasing fashion. Makes it look like we are moving really close to pre-1999 days when in fact we have a bit more room to "bubble".