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I think what's most telling about this article is how little people outside of tech understood about the internet. I guess the dot com crash helped with the FUD

I think what's most telling about this article is how little people outside of tech understood about the internet. I guess the dot com crash helped with the FUD, but the takeaway for me is that usually news orgs are behind when trying to understand where tech is going, and their insight can be stunted because of this.

benihana 11y ago
Do you have a specific example?
- SandersAK 11y ago
  http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/technology/22ECOM.html?pagewanted=3 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/technology/22ECOM.html?pag... It's mostly the tone of articles - a sense that this internet thing isn't quite there yet and there are consumer expectations that internet simply can't account for (which in the case of the article cited, we know is false because of things like pinterest etc). The stuff I'm thinking about now is when articles talk about Snapchat, memes, gifs etc, the angle is coming from a very dismissive place. Mostly talking about mainstream media though.
dkrich 11y ago
That's interesting, because I actually found the article pretty impressive considering the timing. It's easy to look back 13 years later and laugh at the title, but some of the finer points were pretty insightful. Many parts of the article are very foretelling, even if they weren't the personal opinion of the author. For example, pointing out that using text ads over graphical ones improved the speed and was an important aspect for users is noteworthy, as well as Brin and Page's insistence that focusing on the technology would bring users and, in turn, ad revenue is as well. This article was written just a couple of years after a major crash of tech stocks that had absolutely no way to make a buck, so some skepticism was in order, I believe. In fact the vast majority of .com's were not profitable so it's not as if a company that at the time was trailing Yahoo! and Overture and barely profitable was inevitably going to become the Google we know today.
- SandersAK 11y ago
  Yeah maybe part of it is hindsight on my end. I agree that the FUD is because of the crash.

benihana 11y ago

Do you have a specific example?

SandersAK 11y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/technology/22ECOM.html?pagewanted=3 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/technology/22ECOM.html?pag... It's mostly the tone of articles - a sense that this internet thing isn't quite there yet and there are consumer expectations that internet simply can't account for (which in the case of the article cited, we know is false because of things like pinterest etc). The stuff I'm thinking about now is when articles talk about Snapchat, memes, gifs etc, the angle is coming from a very dismissive place. Mostly talking about mainstream media though.

dkrich 11y ago

That's interesting, because I actually found the article pretty impressive considering the timing. It's easy to look back 13 years later and laugh at the title, but some of the finer points were pretty insightful. Many parts of the article are very foretelling, even if they weren't the personal opinion of the author. For example, pointing out that using text ads over graphical ones improved the speed and was an important aspect for users is noteworthy, as well as Brin and Page's insistence that focusing on the technology would bring users and, in turn, ad revenue is as well. This article was written just a couple of years after a major crash of tech stocks that had absolutely no way to make a buck, so some skepticism was in order, I believe. In fact the vast majority of .com's were not profitable so it's not as if a company that at the time was trailing Yahoo! and Overture and barely profitable was inevitably going to become the Google we know today.

SandersAK 11y ago
Yeah maybe part of it is hindsight on my end. I agree that the FUD is because of the crash.