At the beginning of the century, I wrote a fair amount about how the bubbles were going to burst as the dotcom fiasco headed down the drain. But once the recession was in full swing, I found myself cheerleading for a recovery that was fairly certain to happen, at least in the enterprise software market. And it did. Oh, for the good, old days.
Today I'm a lot more pessimistic about a recovery and manufacturers' ability to come through in one piece. Cheerleading is looking a little like a fool's errand right now, and here's why.
The dotcom bust was a failure of a brand-new business model — so new there were no rules, no precedents, nothing to go on but vague promises of a preternaturally youthful and ridiculously optimistic class of prognosticators who were going to "disintermediate" the entire brick-and-mortar economy and otherwise change business as we knew it.
What was reassuring, in retrospect, was how safe it felt to watch such a new edifice come crashing down. Sure, the dotcom boom ended with an enormous crash, but what was wiped out had not yet become fully ingrained in our economy and so it was relatively easy to envision dialing back a few years and starting afresh, sans the over-hyped new-economy nonsense and its silly marching band of dotcomers.