As covered widely in the press & on the web - today is the anniversary of the peak of the NASDAQ tech stocks."On 10 March 2000, the Nasdaq index of leading technology shares spiked, bursting the Dotcom bubble."
I was in my tenth year at Oracle at the time - though would leave in the Summer and join in with a badly/unluckily timed yet prescient start up intended to digitally distribute classical music. Searching for funding for an Internet venture in Q2 of 2000 turned out to be not a good plan!(Of course I blame the likes of pets.com and boo.com and the fools who gave them millions to burn with no sound business plan).
Those late nineties boom years were great fun though.. with much of the promise being fulfilled within a decade or so.
I have fond memories of touting an (ahem) N|C (network computer) around Europe... another idea before its time (and of course fatally flawed in execution). But we see the promise of "thin client computing" fulfilled in today's IT via various technologies (netbooks, smartphones, tablets, "cloud computing", virtual desktops etc.). Larry's vision was good - the timing and execution questionable.
The other main technology I was associated with at that time was "Video on Demand". Fifteen years on from the excitement of the early trials (with BT in the UK) streamed high quality (OK, decent-ish quality) video is normal today (BC iPlayer Youtube et al).
Some of my friends and colleagues from those days are still at Oracle - some (unbelievably!) having served 20+ years there.
So where were you and what memories do you have?
BBC News - Dotcom bubble burst: 10 years on.
WIRED: March 10, 2000: Pop Goes the Nasdaq!
networkworld: Time Flies Dept.: Dot-com craze peaked 10 years ago
