This would be the ultimate confirmation that the New Economy was a hoax, that the Internet was/is a useless, dying fad that will never make money for anyone, that it is all over, poof.
It is important not to confuse (a) new economy companies with (b) e-commerce or (c) the web or (d) the Internet.
Personally, I think that while most of the "new economy" b2c companies will go bust, e-commerce is here to stay, as part of click and mortar, online auctions, hard to get items, b2c, and others.
Not only that, all e-commerce companies could go away and yet the web be very successful (for example, as source of technical documentation and manuals for any product you buy, thus saving printing costs).
Similarly all the web could go away and yet the internet still be very successful, for example, e-mail is here to stay, no question about it, and guess what? e-mail is based on the internet.
Having said that, one of the biggest revolutions on the history of humanity is the printing press. No major corporation benefited from that invention for over 300 years... It wasn't until the appearance of the first press barons in Great Britain last century (whence the term) that major empires were built on content distribution over paper.
The web could well turn out to be just like that. A major revolution with no single major beneficiary, meaning we are all better off, but nobody managed to collect a noticeable portion of that wealth (except perhaps for CISCO :-) |
