The Last Bubble makes it Cheaper to Disrupt than Migrate
The last bubble and aggressive consumer adoption of the Internet channel for retail transactions are going to create opportunities for disruptive innovation. Wired highlights why we are in a market where it is cheaper to innovate than to carefully migrate to the Internet.
First, technology adoption has continued at a torrid pace (and even accelerated at times) despite the bust. The dotcom business models of the 1990s may have been based on wild projections of broadband, advertising, and ecommerce trends. But the funny thing is, even after the bubble burst, those trends continued. These days, it’s hard to find a technology-adoption projection from 1999 that hasn’t come true.
The second reason that this boom is so different from the last is that the sunk costs of the dotcom era make the economics of entrepreneurship more favorable. In the bad old days, companies bankrupted themselves building out their fiber-optic networks. Bad for investors, good for everyone else: We’re now enjoying supercheap bandwidth. So, too, for storage, screens, and a host of other technologies that are benefiting from profligate ’90s-era investment and research.