Comment by polychrome
12 years ago
While I initially agree with you and can understand your view point based on your previous experience, I think there are two categories of tech: -Business Value Add -Hype / Marketing
I separate these out because we've already gone through a terrible economic downturn that is sputtering to produce jobs and yet we see an explosion of jobs in the tech sector. That's because of the value add software that is reducing the number of employees, paperwork or steps in a process a business needs in order to operate.
Those types of companies are going to be fine through another economic downturn because their clients have realized how much their saving by using the software. These value add tech businesses may see a slow down, but not a collapse.
The biggest example that is here to stay is E-Commerce. Look at how many companies / businesses are realizing how much easier / cheaper it is to go online than build a brick and mortar store with employees, rent, utilities, taxes, repairs, maintenance, etc.
Even some apps are here to stay. AirBNB, for example, is a personal value add when I'm traveling. I have no problem paying them a couple dollars to reduce my overall travel costs by 15-30%.
What will collapse almost overnight are the apps, websites, etc that are simply fluffy websites, marketing materials, or buggy unusable software.
My thought is stick with the people helping other people make or save money, and you'll be safe through the next one.
>I think there are two categories of tech: -Business Value Add -Hype / Marketing
It's harder to tell the difference than you think.
For an example, during the first dot-com, how about amazon? selling books online. Hurr hurr. what a great and revolutionary business plan. Hell, after the crash, for a while, I was selling books online, and writing software to automate warehouse operations. It's actually a really interesting space, if you ask me, but in 1997, well, to me it didn't look like a billion-dollar idea.
Turns out? it was one of those ideas (or implementations) that turned out to be a really good idea. It was not obvious that it was a good idea (or good implementation) at all, not until after the crash.
Or ebay. There was a sea of auction sites. A huge number of auction sites. It was not at all clear that ebay would continue on to be the marketplace of choice.
And for every amazon and ebay, there were a thousand imitators.
And what about Yahoo!? It sure looked like curated portals were the way to go. it looked like they would be the gateway to the internet. Nope.
AOL was in the same boat. It looked a lot like real value, but was, in fact, pyrite.
I think the biggest story is that the people who added the value that was most tangible? the telecoms who actually trenched in all the fiber? A huge number of those went bankrupt. And those are the companies, were I playing stocks at the time, I would have bought. Those companies seemed to be the 'real-estate' of the internet, as they owned the fiber in the ground. In a real sense, they owned they physical layer that the internet was built upon.