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Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot.com) companies were the collection of start-up companies selling products or services using or somehow related to the Internet. They proliferated in the late 1990s dot-com boom, a speculative frenzy of investment in Internet and Internet-related technical stocks and enterprises. The name derives from the fact that many of them have the ".com" DNS suffix built into their company name. 1 Overview
A canonical "dot-com" company's business model relied on network effects to justify losing money to build market share, or even mind share, through giving their product away in the hope that they could eventually charge for it. Many raised cash through public offerings on the stock exchanges, with stock often soaring to dizzying heights and making the initial controllers of the company wildly rich on paper. Dot-com companies were stereotyped as having extremely young and inexperienced managers wearing polo shirts with lavish offices including foosball, free food and soft drinks as well as Aeron chairThe Aeron chair is a product of Herman Miller, designed in 1994 by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf. It is an ergonomic chair which is expensive but which many regard as extremely comfortable. The chair became an unintended symbol of the rise and fall of thes. Companies frequently held parties or expositions where free pens, t-shirts, stress balls, and other trinkets were given away emblazoned with the company's logo. The companies were also stereotyped as requiring extremely long work hours and high pressure.
An annual event started in 19961996 was a leap year starting on Monday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty''. Events January January 5 Hamas operative Yahya Ayyash is killed by an Israeli-planted booby-trapped cell phone Jan, the Webby AwardsPresented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the Webby Awards are a set of awards presented to the "world's best websites". The awards have been given out since 1996. There is also a second set of awards called the People's Voice A works to recognize the best websites on the Internet. The event was typically an extravaganza held annually in San Francisco, CaliforniaFor other meanings, see San Francisco (disambiguation). Bay Bridge. In the distance is fog covering the western third of the city. Click for additional information The City and County of San Francisco (population 776,773), the fourth-largest city in the s, near the heart of Silicon ValleySilicon Valley is a nickname for the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California, USA. It encompasses the northern part of Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities in the southern parts of the San Francisco Peninsula and East Bay. The ceremonies mirrored the flashy dot-com lifestyle with costumed guests, modern dancers, and faux-paparazzi to make guests feel important. The event peaked in 2001 with thousands in attendance. In 2002, it was a more somber event with only several hundred guests and little of the excess of the late 1990s. In 2003, the awards were reduced to a virtual event because many of the nominees couldn't fly to San Francisco due primarily to corporate belt-tightening. During the boom, attendees could slip away from their work for a short time without fear of losing their jobs.
2 Soaring stocks
A stock market bubbleA Stock market bubble is a type of economic bubble in which an exaggerated bull market where the value of stocks listed on a stock exchange rise dramatically upon a wave of public enthusiasm. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s is one example. The biotech in financial markets is a term applied to a rise or boom in the share prices of stocks of a particular industry, and applied only in retrospect when share prices have since crashed. Typically many companies thus become grossly overvalued. When the bubble "bursts", the shares become worth a small fraction of their value at the height of the boom, and many companies went out of business.
The late 1990s boom in technology dot-com company stocks is a good example of a bubble, which burst in late 2000This page is about the year 2000. See 2000 AD for the UK comic book, Number 2000 for other uses. 2000 is a leap year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar), and also the International Year for a Culture of Peace''. Events Y2K passes without the seri and through 2001.
The dot-com model was inherently flawed: a vast number of companies all had the same business plan of monopolising their respective sectors through network effects, and it was clear that even if the plan was sound, there could only be at most one network-effects winner in each sector, and therefore that most companies with this business plan would fail. In fact, many sectors could not support even one company powered entirely by network effects.
In spite of this, vast fortunes were made by a few company founders whose companies were bought out at an early stage in the dot-com stock market bubble. These early successes made the bubble even more buoyant.
