8 ms·

Someone please make the bubble die

26 points by rams 19y ago

alaskamiller 19y ago
I like swearing. I swear all the time. Fuck is the most elegant and multi-useful word universally known. In fact, I love swearing so much I even swear at my own grandmother. But it was funny. The tone and voice of the author doesn't carry well. It's not funny. It's not satirical. Just a guy swearing about doom and gloom. Uncov, Flocksucks, and even Valleywag, this is not.
Xichekolas 19y ago
I thought this was hilariously cynical. Of course, I might just be in a cynical mood reading this at my day job.
alex_c 19y ago
You can ignore it... you can join it... or you can whine about it. Which one's the least productive?
- karzeem 19y ago
  Or you can change it by building more compelling products, which is what the author (in his own, angry-to-the-point-that-it-hurts-his-writing kind of way) is wishing for.
sabat 19y ago
Someone please make this meme die. We are NOT IN A BUBBLE. Most of the country is not in good economic condition. The stock market is rocky, and is not inflated. There no parallels to 1999 here. VC investment != a bubble. Say it to yourself a few times.
- Jd 19y ago
  It is always good to be challenged with the 'we are in a bubble' postings simply because a bubble can't happen so long as people are willing and able to practically evaluate the functionality of their own technologies. At least, that's what I believe Buffett would say.
maw 19y ago
Not bad -- or off base -- until he goes all "I'm smarter than you" at end.
garbowza 19y ago
I'm not sure the point of this rant. Let me summarize what I got out of this: This author thinks we're in a bubble because: 1) the startups having unique names 2) you can't change text size of widgets 3) nobody codes as well as he does I wasn't convinced he was right until he starting swearing... then I was sure he knew what he was talking about.
- tx 19y ago
  He complains about shitty over-hyped products that can be easily copied by a 14-year old over a weekend. He complains about sea of companies that make stuff that nobody wants because nobody is paying for it. One thing for sure: over half of "products" announced on TechCrunch is less work than a typical graduate CS class project at UT (Texas). Downmod me all you want, but Twitter is a joke. And FaceBook is not a "six billion dollar company". And "millions of users" who are not paying for your services do not translate into sustainable business just because of the "millions" word.
  - henryw 19y ago
    You gotta give them credit for scaling and marketing themselves.
  - karzeem 19y ago
    It reminds me of an urban legend I heard about a Porsche dealer who held a "buy one car, get another free" promotion, thinking he'd make it up on volume. People who introduce the crufty products that the author rightly complains about focus too much on short term trends. Two prescriptions that help: 1) Read "Fooled By Randomness". 2) Avoid TechCrunch et al. like the plague.
  - eusman 19y ago
    tell that to YouTube, del.icio.us, flickr
    - tx 19y ago
      Nothing of what I have written above applies to these 3. Neither can be written by a 14 year old over a weekend, YouTube is a lot of tech to handle. Flickr never nad problems with users paying for their services. Finally, del.icio.us does not even belong to a group of companies this thread is all about (over-hyped startups with venture millions, producing crap) - it was a personal part-time pet project of a guy who didn't live in the Valley, didn't ask for millions for coding it. He wasn't even a professional programmer as far as I know. In my view, you can be either a technology company (YouTube) or a revenue company (MySpace). Or both (Google). Overwhelming number of Web 2.0 startups are neither.
pg 19y ago
It's hard to find a line of reasoning in this to refute. Always a bad sign.
- Xichekolas 19y ago
  Eh, the line about 'forgettable names' is pretty easy to refute. Anything successful on the net has a strange name. Yahoo is the canonical example. Heck they even made commercials about it. I'm sure Viaweb was easier to remember than interactivestorebuilder.com would have been. All the names of startups on Techcrunch seem pretty memorable to me. Heck I remembered buxfer like a month after I first read about it, without even having been to their site before. I think he had one decent point in among all the confusing incoherent thoughts... the 'do stupid shit faster!' part. I for one, welcome any web application that makes the 'stupid shit' in my life easier to get out of the way, so I can focus on shit of the non-stupid variety.
  - ajju 19y ago
    So you are saying that because the names don't matter, there is no bubble?
- brent 19y ago
  I'm not sure its a bad sign per se. It should just be a wakeup call back to reality (a good thing!). I (temporarily) bailed on the startup world for graduate school because most of it was uninteresting, unproductive, cutesy cruft. It may take some time, but eventually I think others will get bored with the web 2.0 gravy train and get back to real, productive innovation. Put simply, next time I talk to a VC it won't be any novelty widget or web technology, it will be about something that will make the world a better place. If meeting that criteria makes it Something 3.0, so be it.
  - deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]
  - Alex3917 19y ago
    Clearly you interpreted the grandparent comment differently than I did. :-)
edw519 19y ago
Great rant. I'm just a little reluctant to throw the baby out with the bath water. This is a GREAT TIME to be in the IT business if you know what you're doing, understand your market, really care about your customers, and are able to implement modern technology where it's needed in a sensible way. We already know lots of lame start-ups will get washed away. Let's wish those people better success on their second try.
edw519 19y ago
"Pick up a book on economics, journalism, the environment, history, etc." Er, no. Get a job. Do something in a living breathing organism called a "business". Learning x 1000. "seems like it would be easy to spook Angel investors" Don't need no stinkin' angel. It's 2007. It takes about $500, a little knowledge, and a lot of sweat to build an IT business now. Find a customer, an angel who doesn't get equity or pay back.
bluishgreen 19y ago
Completely unrelated observation. If you want to really offend someone try to be specific. Like when my friend called me a jerk I used to brush it off, but this one girl I met recently called me a <insert-my-favorite-food> eating jerk. And you know what. It worked :( But still this one just seems to be funny. "Look, you little Bay Area-dwelling, public transportation-using, podcatching, bespectacled too-cool-for-cool circlejerk pricks: calm the fuck down. Chill the fuck out and read a computer science textbook." Probably because I do read Computer Science text books. Meh..I am gonna brush it off. (Just to set the balance, I have also been called a God aside being called a jerk. So don't judge me yet)
chaostheory 19y ago
if he's right isn't this a good thing? most of the startups that are successful now, started during (or close to) the dotbomb or some other economic crisis/recession (I think both MS and Apple did the same)...

26 points by rams 19y ago

I like swearing. I swear all the time. Fuck is the most elegant and multi-useful word universally known. In fact, I love swearing so much I even swear at my own grandmother. But it was funny. The tone and voice of the author doesn't carry well. It's not funny. It's not satirical. Just a guy swearing about doom and gloom. Uncov, Flocksucks, and even Valleywag, this is not.

Xichekolas 19y ago

I thought this was hilariously cynical. Of course, I might just be in a cynical mood reading this at my day job.

alex_c 19y ago

You can ignore it... you can join it... or you can whine about it. Which one's the least productive?

karzeem 19y ago
Or you can change it by building more compelling products, which is what the author (in his own, angry-to-the-point-that-it-hurts-his-writing kind of way) is wishing for.

sabat 19y ago

Someone please make this meme die. We are NOT IN A BUBBLE. Most of the country is not in good economic condition. The stock market is rocky, and is not inflated. There no parallels to 1999 here. VC investment != a bubble. Say it to yourself a few times.

Jd 19y ago
It is always good to be challenged with the 'we are in a bubble' postings simply because a bubble can't happen so long as people are willing and able to practically evaluate the functionality of their own technologies. At least, that's what I believe Buffett would say.

maw 19y ago

Not bad -- or off base -- until he goes all "I'm smarter than you" at end.

garbowza 19y ago

I'm not sure the point of this rant. Let me summarize what I got out of this: This author thinks we're in a bubble because: 1) the startups having unique names 2) you can't change text size of widgets 3) nobody codes as well as he does I wasn't convinced he was right until he starting swearing... then I was sure he knew what he was talking about.

tx 19y ago
He complains about shitty over-hyped products that can be easily copied by a 14-year old over a weekend. He complains about sea of companies that make stuff that nobody wants because nobody is paying for it. One thing for sure: over half of "products" announced on TechCrunch is less work than a typical graduate CS class project at UT (Texas). Downmod me all you want, but Twitter is a joke. And FaceBook is not a "six billion dollar company". And "millions of users" who are not paying for your services do not translate into sustainable business just because of the "millions" word.
- henryw 19y ago
  You gotta give them credit for scaling and marketing themselves.
- karzeem 19y ago
  It reminds me of an urban legend I heard about a Porsche dealer who held a "buy one car, get another free" promotion, thinking he'd make it up on volume. People who introduce the crufty products that the author rightly complains about focus too much on short term trends. Two prescriptions that help: 1) Read "Fooled By Randomness". 2) Avoid TechCrunch et al. like the plague.
- eusman 19y ago
  tell that to YouTube, del.icio.us, flickr
  - tx 19y ago
    Nothing of what I have written above applies to these 3. Neither can be written by a 14 year old over a weekend, YouTube is a lot of tech to handle. Flickr never nad problems with users paying for their services. Finally, del.icio.us does not even belong to a group of companies this thread is all about (over-hyped startups with venture millions, producing crap) - it was a personal part-time pet project of a guy who didn't live in the Valley, didn't ask for millions for coding it. He wasn't even a professional programmer as far as I know. In my view, you can be either a technology company (YouTube) or a revenue company (MySpace). Or both (Google). Overwhelming number of Web 2.0 startups are neither.

pg 19y ago

It's hard to find a line of reasoning in this to refute. Always a bad sign.

Xichekolas 19y ago
Eh, the line about 'forgettable names' is pretty easy to refute. Anything successful on the net has a strange name. Yahoo is the canonical example. Heck they even made commercials about it. I'm sure Viaweb was easier to remember than interactivestorebuilder.com would have been. All the names of startups on Techcrunch seem pretty memorable to me. Heck I remembered buxfer like a month after I first read about it, without even having been to their site before. I think he had one decent point in among all the confusing incoherent thoughts... the 'do stupid shit faster!' part. I for one, welcome any web application that makes the 'stupid shit' in my life easier to get out of the way, so I can focus on shit of the non-stupid variety.
- ajju 19y ago
  So you are saying that because the names don't matter, there is no bubble?
brent 19y ago
I'm not sure its a bad sign per se. It should just be a wakeup call back to reality (a good thing!). I (temporarily) bailed on the startup world for graduate school because most of it was uninteresting, unproductive, cutesy cruft. It may take some time, but eventually I think others will get bored with the web 2.0 gravy train and get back to real, productive innovation. Put simply, next time I talk to a VC it won't be any novelty widget or web technology, it will be about something that will make the world a better place. If meeting that criteria makes it Something 3.0, so be it.
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
- Alex3917 19y ago
  Clearly you interpreted the grandparent comment differently than I did. :-)

edw519 19y ago

Great rant. I'm just a little reluctant to throw the baby out with the bath water. This is a GREAT TIME to be in the IT business if you know what you're doing, understand your market, really care about your customers, and are able to implement modern technology where it's needed in a sensible way. We already know lots of lame start-ups will get washed away. Let's wish those people better success on their second try.

edw519 19y ago

"Pick up a book on economics, journalism, the environment, history, etc." Er, no. Get a job. Do something in a living breathing organism called a "business". Learning x 1000. "seems like it would be easy to spook Angel investors" Don't need no stinkin' angel. It's 2007. It takes about $500, a little knowledge, and a lot of sweat to build an IT business now. Find a customer, an angel who doesn't get equity or pay back.

bluishgreen 19y ago

Completely unrelated observation. If you want to really offend someone try to be specific. Like when my friend called me a jerk I used to brush it off, but this one girl I met recently called me a <insert-my-favorite-food> eating jerk. And you know what. It worked :( But still this one just seems to be funny. "Look, you little Bay Area-dwelling, public transportation-using, podcatching, bespectacled too-cool-for-cool circlejerk pricks: calm the fuck down. Chill the fuck out and read a computer science textbook." Probably because I do read Computer Science text books. Meh..I am gonna brush it off. (Just to set the balance, I have also been called a God aside being called a jerk. So don't judge me yet)

chaostheory 19y ago

if he's right isn't this a good thing? most of the startups that are successful now, started during (or close to) the dotbomb or some other economic crisis/recession (I think both MS and Apple did the same)...