REVERSE-TOPIC: All the glitches on SI today make me wonder about aspects of the Net crash and larger market direction that I've not seen discussed before, though I'm sure there must be some lively forum on the subjects I have in mind (any suggestions appreciated): At what point will the radical de-valuation, super-decimation, and going-out-of-business-sale destruction visited upon Internet companies, both public and private, in conjunction with whatever shifting economic realities, necessarily result in noticeable and accelerating declines in choice, quality, customer care, efficiency, and accessibility among the many sites and services which we now take for granted? At what point will the surviving players, enjoying monopolies or something close to them, be able to raise prices or in some instances for the first time impose them? Did the funding levels associated with the IPO and venture capital "mania" artificially lower or obscure actual barriers to entry? Does the now widespread presumption of unlikely profitability raise those barriers higher, even if a newly "disciplined" dot-com employment pool may also be ready now to work for wages which a year ago management would have been ashamed to offer to cleaning services?
Has any serious, accessible work been done on alternative/traditional net-economy models? Could, say, the "e-postage fee" hoax someday come true? The relatively high cost of most WAP services along with NetZero's recent imposition of fees for heavy users suggest to me that we may be at risk of dialing back to something like the old dial-up model, but as dominated by "Old Economy" companies that have been figuratively sitting back and clipping their fingernails waiting for the first and second waves to be spent out, and for the battered, bloodied, and shell-shocked survivors to come begging. (BTW, if AOL - presuming things go as planned - looks brilliant for moving when it could, does that make TWX stupid?)
As for implications on trading and investing, there may still be some fleeting signs of life and a few tremendous finds amidst the wreckage, but the game of "how low can they go" may be long from over. Still, if AMZN and TSCM and INSP (and SI), for instance, all fell, how would you feel? I'd feel a substantial loss, myself. I don't know whether that feeling can be successfully monetized, but it's what makes me still want to believe that somehow they and others will pull through. |
