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The "picks and shovels" people from the dotcom days all went broke. The stuff they had convinced themselves and their investors was crucial turned out to be not
by jeffbee 6mo ago
The "picks and shovels" people from the dotcom days all went broke. The stuff they had convinced themselves and their investors was crucial turned out to be not important.
- newsclues 6mo agoWorking out for nvidia right now
- ohNoe5 6mo agoHardware is important to operation of computers and software as we know them A bunch of config management DSL startups, and web scale data storage solutions, not so much
- irishcoffee 6mo agoRight, and Google owns 25% of the hardware.
- cyberax 6mo agoCisco is doing great. Sun got acquired by Oracle. Oracle itself is also fine (apart from it is Oracle). Akamai is doing fine. From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.
- jeffbee 6mo agoThe glass-in-the-ground people went spectacularly broke. I also suggest you look up the stock price chart for JDSU. On the software side, Ariba and Commerce One.
- fragmede 6mo agoQwest
- cyberax 6mo agoYeah, hardware companies got hit hard. But dotcom also coincided with the de-industrialization era, with manufacturing moving out of the US, with a double whammy of commodization. So it's hard to disentangle the causes. And then I can't really remember many Internet-focused software pick&shovels companies from that era. I was only starting my professional career at that time, though.
- warkdarrior 6mo agoMicrosoft - doing fine Netscape - dead (server) and/or dying (Mozilla) Intel - almost dead Palm - dead Qualcomm - still around
- nerdsniper 6mo agoINTC shot up >300% in the past 8 months and is now at its highest stock price ever, fwiw.
- cyberax 6mo agoI guess Netscape counts. Palm produced devices, so it was not really picks&shovels. Who else? Borland quietly withered away, but it had never been focused on tools specifically for the Internet.
- bryanlarsen 6mo ago> Cisco is doing great. https://totalrealreturns.com/s/CSCO https://totalrealreturns.com/s/CSCO
- shellwizard 6mo ago3Com / US Robotics - dead Nortel - dead Global crossing - dead
- TitaRusell 6mo agoNobody actually goes broke anymore man. They'll still be multi millionaires. They will still have a contact list. Hell you will receive a pardon if it comes to that. It's actually really hard for the aristocracy to end up in a Florida trailer park.
- jeffbee 6mo agoWell, I worked at a picks-and-shovels scam where four executives were convicted of federal offenses and two got prison sentences. I don't know if they are still rich or not.
- GuB-42 6mo agoI guess they failed at the "during the gold rush" part. Selling picks and shovels after the gold rush is a terrible idea.