I am an alumni of the first Internet Boom/Bust cycle, more specifically of Viant Corp which was originally founded with the name "Silicon Valley Internet Partners" or SVIP. I joined SVIP from Merrill Lynch, and the shift was dramatic... SVIP and eventually Viant was an organization of extremely bright, energetic, optimistic, creative and interesting people. People who, to this day, remain in touch. There is a Viant Yahoo group where a few of us communicate and many of us lurk. Recently there was a thread around the current events in the market and the general feeling that...
Things will get worse before they get better... The "spend more than you earn" party is over. It's going to be a massive hang-over.
A fellow former CXO responded in his characteristically upbeat , poetic and humorous style. I enjoyed it so much that I've included it below....
True, but I am old.
In junior high school, Comet Kohoutek was predicted by some to wipe out the entire Earth. True, this was mostly predicted by people in California and,true again, most Americans were stoned out of their gourd during that time period...so that prediction doesn't really count.
But when I was in high school we all learned the metric system because "the rest of the world uses it and by 1980 America will too!". Well, that didn't happen.
A little later, Time magazine ran a cover story on "The Second Ice Age" which was fast approaching upon us and would have Americans moving to Mexico in droves so they wouldn't freeze to death! (Seriously, look it up, it was the late 70's.) Now we are warming globally, it seems, and Ohio will soon have beachfront property.
Let's see, what else? Communism was on the doorstep of taking over the world and we would all be calling each other comrade by the turn of the century. A wall came down instead.
Here's my favorite: Y2K. Remember that one, folks? People were preparing for the end of the world (again) and I think the only thing that happened was that one toaster in Australia malfunctioned or something.
I'm not saying that this isn't a real crisis or that there won't be real pain and suffering as a result of this. There probably will be.
I'm just skeptical.
Optimists vastly outperform pessimists.
I know that's true because a consulting company proved it to me with a 3X3 matrix and a very thick presentation binder that made a loud "thud" when they dropped it on my desk next to their Y2K report.
-Bill
Thank for sharing Bill!
