

Someone please make the bubble die - rams
http://metacircular.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/someone-please-make-the-bubble-die/

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

~~~
brent
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.

~~~
Alex3917
Clearly you interpreted the grandparent comment differently than I did. :-)

~~~
brent
Ha! I just re-read it. Good call. I totally misread pg's comment, but still
stand by the points I made.

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garbowza
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
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.

~~~
eusman
tell that to YouTube, del.icio.us, flickr

~~~
tx
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.

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

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bluishgreen
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)

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alex_c
You can ignore it... you can join it... or you can whine about it.

Which one's the least productive?

~~~
karzeem
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.

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edw519
"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.

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chaostheory
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)...

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

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edw519
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.

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alaskamiller
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.

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sabat
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
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.

