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Non-Tech : Tulipomania Blowoff Contest: Why and When will it end? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 10K a day who wrote (2296)	12/26/1999 11:04:00 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3543

Jeff Bozos is THE P.T. Barnum of our time: "The Internet Wears Out Its Welcome. -NUFF already. It is the surest sign that the Internet is totally mainstream: Everyone is tired of it, not just the sleep-starved workers at dot-com startups, but everyone -- man and beast alike. Turn on the television and you are assaulted by an endless parade of jabbering advertisements for e-commerce companies. Newspapers are so bloated these days with ads for dot-com marketers that dogs across the nation must be loosening their teeth and straining their necks to fetch them. The latest sign of the times was Time magazine's selection last week of Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, the big online retailer of everything from books to toys, as its "Person of the Year." Time's cover headline declares, "E-commerce Is Changing the Way the World Shops." Inside is a large picture of Mr. Bezos' face, doctored with a white "e" inserted in his left eye. "An Eye on the Future," says the accompanying headline. Though Mr. Bezos is worth $10 billion, he doesn't really care about the money, Time says. And a Time reporter says that Amazon's workers are "all imbued with this giddy faith that their best days lie ahead of them." Innovations in technology and communications -- the telegraph, telephone, automobile, airplane and others -- have often touched off waves of optimism and exuberant claims about how the new thing is going to transform society. In the 1920's, for example, as the airplane moved beyond the Red Baron stage and started to become used for carrying civilian passengers, there was a lot of talk of every household having a personal airplane in its garage. That strain of euphoria was called "air-mindedness." Technology historians remain skeptical that the Internet age can match the period from about the 1880's to 1910 in terms of its impact on people's lives. Inventions and new products from that period of technological dynamism included Bessemer steel making, refrigeration, the light bulb, the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, the automobile and the airplane. Still, the historians say, there does seem to be one truly distinctive feature about the present. "I don't think there has ever been anything like the Internet and cyberspace craze in terms of media hype," said Robert C. Post, a technology historian and a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution. The use and abuse of a single vowel -- "e" -- also seems without precedent. And I.B.M. is largely to blame. Since Lou Gerstner took over in 1993, I.B.M. had been trying to give its image as a mainframe dinosaur a makeover. By 1995, it was apparent that the Internet was the future, and the company began promoting itself first as an expert in "network-centric computing," then "network computing" and then "Internet solutions" -- before settling on "e-business" in fall 1997. Rivals scoffed at first, and then scurried to copy I.B.M. when the marketing campaign caught on. By now, all the Internet stories seem familiar -- of dot-com millionaires, or billionaires, of young people fleeing business schools, investment banks and consulting firms to join the Internet gold rush. Mike Ruettgers, the president of EMC, which sells the big data storage equipment used by so many e-commerce companies, was rummaging through his briefcase recently and pulled out a family picture. It showed his daughter at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked. Still there? "Nah, she's 24 and went off to join a dot-com company like everybody else," Mr. Ruettgers replied in a tone that suggested he was belaboring the obvious. Things could get more interesting if, as some analysts predict, there will soon be a Darwinian winnowing among dot-com companies who have bet so much of their venture capital money on ads to try to become brand names during the do-or-die holiday season. The winners will play on, while the losers will have little to show for it and scant chance of raising more money. "These companies are burning enormous amounts of cash, and there will be a massive shakeout in the new year after it becomes clear who did well and who didn't," said Michael Hansen, an e-commerce specialist at the Boston Consulting Group. "