After the Bubble

The Y2K bug generated a lot of fear, but all that hype fizzled
when the new millennium didn’t start with a digital apocalypse.
It turns out that fear was just aimed at the wrong catastrophe.
While plenty were riding high on the rise of the internet beyond
the Y2K scare, another disaster had been brewing since 1995—and
would bring them back down. But the dot-com bubble wasn’t the
end. The internet was here to stay. 

Not long after the turn of the millennium, the dot-com economy
collapsed. Peter Relan points to the flawed business plans that
fueled the dot-com bubble, and how many entrepreneurs and
investors underestimated the complexity of building a business on
the internet. Ernie Smith tells the story of Pets.com, and how a
similar idea a decade later had a much better chance of
succeeding. Gennaro Coufano reveals the element of luck that
saved Amazon from going under —and how it evolved in the
aftermath. Julia Furlan reflects on the changes the dot-com
bubble brought, and what’s left to consider. And Brian McCullough
describes how the dot-com bubble paved the way for a more
resilient digital economy.


If you want to read up on some of our research on the dot-com
bubble, you can check out all our bonus material over at
redhat.com/commandlineheroes. The page is built in the style of
1995—check it out.

Follow along with the episode transcript.