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Is there another tech bubble?
- kls 15y agoWhile there are many factors that point to the industry heating up, I do not believe that we are frothing yet. One of the things that many miss about the .com bust was that the infrastructure just was not there to support the application that where being built. Some of the .com bust was because the entire market moved too soon. Most people where on dial-up, commoditization of servers had not happened, and the toolkits we have today where not available. A lot of the .com bust where good idea's on paper but where just too unusable by the consumer in implementation. Fast forward to today, and much of what is fueling the boom is mobile. The big difference here is that mobile is ready, the infrastructure was there before people jumped in and started to move the industry forward. I sometimes wonder if Steve knew that and kept the iPhone locked away from third party developers until it was ready to sustain the rush. To me the mobile market's growth is a lot more healthy and a lot less exuberant than the .com rush was. I think what is throwing people off, is what I see as a new form of hiring, where a company of developers form around a product that has no hope of commercial success but yet they get acquired. This bothers some because it mirrors the bad ideas of the .com bust, but I tend to look at it as a new form of resume. The VC know good teams are in demand, so they can invest in keeping a team together, while the large players spend a lot of money identifying good candidates, purchasing ready made teams reduces that burden and has a higher success rate. Looking at the VC's as a form of headhunter that invest in keeping a team asset together to sell makes the picture of how that market works a lot clearer. On a side note, after reading the first paragraph of that article, my bullshit meter spiked, I do not know what this paragraph says, other than they made a tool and are most likely selling it or the research from it: in the context of a data-driven value capture and investability model. We have developed a tool called The KeyStone Compact method, which considers multiple corporate element interactions including the replicability of the nexus of a company’s capabilities (assets, networks, skills) relative to the nature and cost of acquisition of complementary assets required to capture value in the market (‘positioning for value capture – PVC’).