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Paradox of dotcoms
Even as dotcom companies faded away, use of the Internet grew.
IF 2001 was not a dull year on the news front, nor was it so in the dotcom universe. More than 530 websites filed for bankruptcy or went out of business, twice as many as in the year 2000. Others picked up the remains of these at throwaway prices. A small Internet company called 1Won picked up the web portal Excite — valued at $6.7 billion just three years ago — for just under $10 million. The assets of 162 troubled or bankrupt companies were acquired in the first three quarters of 2001, with buyers paying an average $13 million for them.
Other high profile closures included Webvan, the U.S. online grocer, Exodus Communications, the web hosting group, Industry Standard, the online business news magazine and website, and Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia's latest venture Arzoo. The good news was that by November, online closures had slowed down to 21, from a high of 62 in May.
After the dotcom bust, life is returning to what it used to be like before 25-year-olds in pony tails became millionaires and installed gyms and dart boards in their offices. In July, the Silicon Valley newspaper Metro printed 100 reasons to celebrate a return to normalcy. Your boss is older than you again. Twenty-eight is too early for a mid-life crisis. Job attention span for 20-somethings can pass four months. And experience and talent can once again count in the job market.
You can once again find receptionists who speak in complete sentences, and use words like "Please" and "Yes". Capitalists need no longer be referred to as "angels". Dumb ideas can die with the dignity of never being funded, instead of being pitched to pension funds as lucrative investments. Teens with pink hair who listen to MP3s for a living no longer get paid more than the national median wage. The dotcom generation will have to retire at 60 after all — not 30.
Lunch hour is once again meant for lunch, not yoga. Independent bookstores will go back to being places to buy books, not just places to browse for titles before buying online. Elegant restaurants can return to being a place for intimate gatherings between friends and lovers, not corporate hangouts for swarms of polo shirts trying to bond.
Fewer intellectual property lawyers are being spawned. Al Gore has stopped boasting that he invented the Internet. Civil service employees can go back to surfing for porn on their work computers, instead of constantly checking their stocks on the Internet. Psychiatrists are no longer suicidal from treating cases of "Sudden Wealth Syndrome". Stupid people are no longer "visionary" now, just plain stupid. Walking someone to the door will once again be considered a courteous gesture.
People finally agree that dropping out of college after reading "HTML for Dummies" wasn't such a good idea after all. And coming soon to a bookstore near you: "Poverty for Dummies" and "Down and Out in Palo Alto".
Sabeer Bhatia... high profile closure.
While normalcy returned to the cyber stricken, being cyber stricken also became more normal. The big paradox of 2001 was that dotcoms continued to go bust but the Internet grew. As the Financial Times reported, even as investors and the economy reeled when dotcom companies and their stocks capsized, the actual, everyday world of cyberspace continued to transform the ways we live, work, study, play and waste time. The Internet stopped being a fad and became an everyday part of life. By August 2001, the number of Web users had tripled, compared to the previous year. Children and youth began to live online, both for their schoolwork and their social life: instant messaging replaced physical get-togethers. Not just in the U.S., but here in India, in the income group that has computers at home. Overall, about 130 million people used the new software to chat.
In the U.S. more people not only talked to each other online, they also checked their bank balances online and shopped online. And once September 11 happened, people used the Internet as never before as a way to follow the news about the terrorist attacks.
Traffic to news sites jumped 14 per cent in September and much of that gain has been sustained, as people have moved away from just following mainstream U.S. media to supplement their news diets with overseas and alternative sources.
More than ever before, 2001 was the year when the Internet stirred to counter the biases of the mainstream media. After the World Trade Center attack articles by Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk flew around the globe into thousands of personal computers via personal mailing lists. Politically correct liberals received copies of the same articles from several sources.
And while the entrepreneurial dotcoms died, new, scarcely funded ones sprang to life. Because the Internet is now the place where non-commercial battles for the heart and mind are fought.
If you are diligent and single minded, you can cut and paste your way (via free web hosting) to a niche global audience the way you never can in the brick and mortar world. With or without money from capitalists called angels.
More copycat shows on Star Plus: The channel is furiously hawking Indian versions of foreign game and talk shows. After "Khulja Sim Sim" which is an adaptation of "Let's Make a Deal", and "Kamzor Kadi Kaun" (which sounds like an Ekta Kapoor serial but is an adaptation of "The Weakest Link") you have "Yeh Hai Right Price" based on "The Price is Right", starting today at 10.30 a.m.. And at 10 a.m. today you have "Bol Baby Bol", a talk show with kids, based on "Small Talk", a long running American show. Tom Cruise on Oprah: tomorrow morning (January 7) at 10.30 a.m. on Star World.
SEVANTI NINAN
E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com
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