Every silver lining has dark clouds around it. This makes for famous last words from a glass-half-empty kind of a person like me, but truth was never farther away from this maxim when stock markets reach bubble proportions. I was witness to the dot com bust in 2000 and to quote from a film a I saw recently - it would be funny if it were not sad. People were pouring money into every venture that had anything to do with the two most powerful vowels in those days - "e" and "i" (for electronic and information respectively). Sometimes things assumed hilarious proportions like one day when the CRISIL (a credit rating agency in India, later acquired by S&P) stock started piercing stratosphere just because the company released a new version of its website. The Chairman of a company I worked for proudly pointed our collective attention to Amazon.com, a company he revered. Why? Because it had no revenue yet commanded such huge market cap,you stupid imbecile. Commonsense economics had clearly left the building.
Turn the clock to what is happening now. The buzzword is anything two point zero. Web 2.0, Datawarehousing 2.0, BI 2.0 - you name it. Blame it all on the cheap money that made bankers and investors throw moolah at ideas that look great on Powerpoint. So you have social networking that is white hot these days. Neural networks and patented algorithms that allow me to connect to the doorman of a building that housed me in Boston for a week in 1996 (the owner of a two point oh venture now lives in the same building so you can connect to him through the doorman, you stupid nineteen eightyfive idiot). Sheer amazing stuff - six degrees of separation. I have 48 contacts in Linkedin (another social networking site for professionals), my friends have 203 at least, everyone recommends everyone and as a family it is much happier than my own. But how do these people make money, I wonder. The day Linkedin asks me to pay for the membership I will walk out - albeit with misty eyes - from this cauldron of social clustering. That perhaps brings us to flogging the most flogged path of revenue generation - online, targeted advertisements. But in a downturn, when everyone is busy running for cover who will stop to advertise lingerie on Linkedin just because your fourth degree separation happens to be that bombshell from college days?
Watch out for the end is nigh. In the words of Warren Buffet - only when the tide goes down will we find out who all were swimming naked. I will run for a swimsuit straightaway.
Turn the clock to what is happening now. The buzzword is anything two point zero. Web 2.0, Datawarehousing 2.0, BI 2.0 - you name it. Blame it all on the cheap money that made bankers and investors throw moolah at ideas that look great on Powerpoint. So you have social networking that is white hot these days. Neural networks and patented algorithms that allow me to connect to the doorman of a building that housed me in Boston for a week in 1996 (the owner of a two point oh venture now lives in the same building so you can connect to him through the doorman, you stupid nineteen eightyfive idiot). Sheer amazing stuff - six degrees of separation. I have 48 contacts in Linkedin (another social networking site for professionals), my friends have 203 at least, everyone recommends everyone and as a family it is much happier than my own. But how do these people make money, I wonder. The day Linkedin asks me to pay for the membership I will walk out - albeit with misty eyes - from this cauldron of social clustering. That perhaps brings us to flogging the most flogged path of revenue generation - online, targeted advertisements. But in a downturn, when everyone is busy running for cover who will stop to advertise lingerie on Linkedin just because your fourth degree separation happens to be that bombshell from college days?
Watch out for the end is nigh. In the words of Warren Buffet - only when the tide goes down will we find out who all were swimming naked. I will run for a swimsuit straightaway.
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