After the Dotcom Crash

[1] Richard W. Stevenson, Why a Business Scandal Became a National Spectacle, New York Times, February 17, 2002.

[2] Bill Keller, Enron for Dummies, New York Times, January 26, 2002.

[3] Timothy Noah, Blaming Liberalism for Enron, www.slate.msn.com, January 21, 2002.

[4] « Perhaps we, as a society, have become so accustomed to associating the act of running a business with the act of making money - or rather, the act of booking revenue in accordance with the arts of accountancy — that corporate analysts appear not to have had an institutional framework capable of distinguishing between an accounting trick and a business process, between a revenue stream and the production of value. » (Jonathan Siegel, posted by Steve Brant on the Triumph of Content list, January 20, 2002).

[5] Kevin Kelly, The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed, Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2002.

[6] Rachel Konrad, Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind, Interview with John Perry Barlow, News.com, February 22, 2002,
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-84334....

[7] Stephen Long, White Collar Blues, The Professional Job Crisis, Australian Financial Review, February 23-24, 2002.

[8] Katrina Nicholas, CBA chief attacks IT for wrecking world economy, Australian Financial Review, March 1, 2002.

[9] Michael Wolff, Burn Rate, London : Orion Books, 1999, p. xii.

[10] Michael Wolff, p. 63. In Burn Rate there is a, in my view, accurate description of Louis Rosetto’s Amsterdam-based magazine Electric Word and the climate in the early nineties which let to their move to San Francisco (not New York) in order to found Wired (described in the chapter ’How it got to be a wired world’ pp. 26-51).

[11] Michael Wolff, p. 8.

[12] http://web.archive.org/web/20000619...
http://www.valueamerica.com/ (this is the URL of Value America as kept alive inside one of the worlds biggest web archives).

[13] Value America’s downfall from $74.25 a share on April 8, 1999 to $2 one year later made VA one of the first in a long series of dotcom crashes. John A. Byrne in Business Week Online, May 1, 2000 wrote a stunning reconstruction of Value America’s doings.

[14] David Kuo, Inside an Internet Goliath - from Lunatic Optimism to Panic and Crash, London : Little, Brown and Company, 2001, p. 305.

[15] Kuo, p. 306.

[16] London Telegraph, May 19, 2000.

[17] Incompetence backed by less expert investors, 4 December, 2001. Reviewer : A reader from Stockholm, Sweden (found on the www.amazon.com.uk site).

[18] Ernst Malmsten, together with Erik Portanger and Charles Drazin, Boo Hoo, a dotcom story from concept to catastrophe, London : Random House, 2001, p. 233.

[19] Malmsten, p. 4.

[20] Malmsten, p. 106.

[21] Malmsten, p. 215/216.

[22] Malmsten, p. 231.

[23] Malmsten, p. 322.

[24] Kuo, p. 311.

[25] The complex dynamics between marketers and the cool, young rebels is well documented in the PBS television production The Merchants of Cool.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front.... The script of this insightful documentary can be downloaded under http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front... .

[26] A response to one of my « from the dotcom observatory » nettime posting could illustrate the gambling attitude : « It was pure dumb luck if a startup was successful or not. Many of the netscapers went to other startups because they thought, "Hey, we have the magic touch" (as everyone else thought as well... hiring magic lucky charms was very popular then) but nearly all of them failed. Most frequently massive misuse of money and no customers caused this (We have to hire 100 people in the next two months !...the ramp-up lie), but it is also being in the right time, right place, with the right connections. Dumb luck. Most people think it was their talents. Because the alternative is horrifyingly unfair. The ones who don’t think it was their talent that made them successful, who made lots of money, have huge issues about deserving the money they made—I know one person who felt so guilty that he *gave* 2 million dollars to the girl he was dating....and she immediately broke up with him, of course. This is not to say that having a group of smart people in your startup wasn’t important—it was, but I can count hundreds of startups that were just "smart" experienced people that failed just the same. » (Anya Sophe Behn, re : nettime, From the Dotcom Observatory, December 26, 2001)

[27] Michael Lewis, The Future Just Happened, London : Hodder & Stoughton, 2001, p. 124.

[28] Bill Joy, Wired, April 2000.

[29] http://web.archive.org/web/20000815...
http://www.purple-moon.com/