Is the Web 2.0 bubble about to burst?


Blow your own Internet bubbleJohn Dvorak published an article over at PC Mag about the Bubble 2.0. He says not only he but many other persons in the media who’ve experienced the previous dot com rise and bust are seeing the same cycle happen again. He’s certain that just like in the past Bubble 2.0 will burst in the near future.

Each succeeding bubble has been worse than its predecessor. Thus nobody is actually able to spot the cycle, since it just looks like a continuum. I can assure you that after this next collapse, nobody will think of the dot-com bubble as anything other than a prelude.

Before the CD-ROM bubble, pad-based computing was all the rage. Every company and a lot of start-ups were going to make this kind of computer. It was a total bust. Before that we had the software wars, when you could choose from dozens and dozens of word processors and spreadsheets. And don’t forget the IBM PC clone wars in there somewhere. These all resulted in one sort of collapse or another.

I think you get the idea.

Each of these bubbles had a distinctive theme. For the dot-com bubble, it was e-commerce—it really should have been called the e-commerce bubble. Everything was focused on how the Internet was going to destroy all existing brick-and-mortar operations. We were told that you’d be buying sandwiches over the Internet and having them delivered the next day by FedEx. Everything was about “eyeballs” and finding ways to attract customers, whether they bought anything or not. Every article in every newspaper in the country parroted the litany as to how you’d be out of business in a year or two if you were not present on the Web in a big way. Of course, this was all crap.

The current bubble, already called Bubble 2.0 to mock the Web 2.0 moniker, is harder to pin down insofar as a primary destructive theme is concerned. A number of unique initiatives, however, are in play here.

You can read more at PC Mag, he also describes some bubblish areas such as neo-social networking, video mania, mobile everything and widgets and toolbars.

I didn’t really experience the previous Internet bubble bust but I see every week that an awful lot of money is invested in projects that may never produce any decent returns.

Oh and by the way, I recently heard that traditional tech media like PC Mag isn’t doing all too great either, PC Mag’s ad sales were 38.8% lower in March 2007 than the same period the year before.


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