Dot com
to Dot com to Dot?
Today in our Information Technology class our
professor took us on “a personal journey through the technology revolution of
the 90’s to today (which has just begun to affect and change the world and
individuals) using slides, props, and horse racing made up of plastic dinosaurs”
that ate each other on their way to success.
The lecture was very interesting. We learned about a
company named Prodigy that was owned by Sears and IBM. I thought that this was
very intriguing because I always thought of Sears as a department store that
nothing to do with the big business of technology. Another fact that I found to
be odd was that CompuServe was owned by H&R Block. I thought wow I guess
the money follows success, but that makes sense to me.
Boom!!! It is 1995 and the world wakes up to the world
wide web. We learned that this was the year that Netscape with Jim Clark and a
student Mark Anderson go public and become the most valuable company according
to the “Dot.com” Boom, but had no revenue! This is unbelievable how someone
tells the masses something is worth a large amount of money and we follow like
sheep.
Furthermore, in 1995 “Wired and Hot Wired”, MCI, How
to Publish on the Internet, Pathfinder launched Time Warner, and the
Advertising Age Magazine were all birthed. During 1995 Bruce Jacobson and Rob
Glazer visited Cole and Weber and Real/ Audio launched along with the NFL’s web
“The Chat before you Spat”. Later funded by SPRY and EDS Free Zone was launched.
At Free Zones peak it had up to 450,000 registered users. The yahoo.com domain
was created on January 18, 1995
In 1996 CompuServe bought Spry. “Acquiring Spry
"demonstrates our commitment to place CompuServe at the forefront of the
Internet industry"(New York Times). and Free Zone goes to Thompson Target
Media along with their business with Baywatch and Nikken. The NFL had Star Ware
which became Espn.com. We also learned about the US web. It was a web company
that would buy up smaller struggling web companies, give them a bonus, and even
let them continue their operation.
Finally, in 1997we seen the insanity begin to take
place. Unfortunately,
one the biggest problems was many
investors were willing to overlook the traditional metrics of investing and begin
basing their confidence on technological advancements.
The era was marked by the formation of numerous new
Internet-based companies. Some of these companies were successful such as
Amazon.com and E-bay, but some of them failed and completely went out of
business.
