By Suzann Dodd, Contributor
A SINGLE article cannot explain what happened. It can only season the 'meat' of the matter.
To begin to comprehend one needs to understand the unhappy marriage between two diametrically opposed philosophies, that of 'freeness' versus capitalism.
Most of what exists in cyberworld was created under the freeness mentality. I need a program which can convert plain text into web ready html, (what you see on the Internet is html; think of it as a language), so I create one. Nobody paid me for it, I didn't do it because I work for a company that pays me, I did it because it makes my life easier.
I send it to a few friends, they give it to a few more friends and people I don't know are sending me e-mail asking me where they can get it, so I zip my program, put it on my website and anyone who wants it can take it.
The Ferrengi idea of 'profit' infects a number of persons who want to 'buy' my programme and 'sell' it to others. Since I have bills to pay, I sell it to them. They rename it, repackage it, link it to their stuff and slap a price tag on it. People who don't know jack about html, conversion, me, my programme, buy it. People who know something get original copies of my stuff and load it on their computers.
Ferrengi, thinking to make money, have gone about it in standard capitalist way. They pay money to form a company. They hire staff, they rent premises, they buy equipment, they pay utilities.
They get others to invest in the belief they will recoup as if they are selling corporeal items as mops or shoes or books.
The shareholders know little if anything about what the company actually does the directors haven't a clue that what might be a necessary basic staff when selling corporeal items is actually goldplating in a cyber business.
No one appreciates the first cyber millionaire was a kid with a computer in his living room. The entire company was this kid and his computer in his living room.
All most people know about him is that he became a millionaire buying and selling on the Web, so think they can too. My Ferrengi think advertising, big public functions, the usual hoopla is the way to go. So they go that way and lose. Big Time.
Investors who've lost their money run from anything that smacks of cyber, so companies that were doing okay are now dumped in the fear that they will go belly up as well.
Everyone is pulling money out of cyber regardless of the specifics and more companies collapse.
This is the dot.com debacle in a byte. Is there money to be made in dot.coms? Yes. Can it be made using standard business practices? No.
Suzann Dodd is a writer and an attorney.
