Its fun to see majority of IPOs in 80s were proper Engineering companies. I was just talking to someone who is a Civil Engineer (in his 50s) and he mentioned t

Its fun to see majority of IPOs in 80s were proper Engineering companies. I was just talking to someone who is a Civil Engineer (in his 50s) and he mentioned the same. He did comment that people in his generation built proper engineering companies. I don't understand why do people think Internet startups are trivial. One way we can say Internet has been game changer - Groupon brought easier advertising mechanism for local SMBs. LinkedIn connected professionals across the world. FB has created a virtual interconnected world. Of course there are duds like Zynga whose biggest achievement so far is pasting cows on the Internet. And multitude of other companies like AirBnB who are disrupting entirely new industries. These companies are definitely gamechangers. However, I've seen lot of my colleagues from fields like Mechancal Engineering or BioMedical Engineering jumped on SoLoMo wagon and mostly working on some awful apps. I think Internet has diverted attention from real engineering to some "shitty" startups/solutions that are in search of problem, thanks to dot com bubble in 90s.