This time is different. Back in the dot com days the companies were public and so the day of reckoning came quickly. Today everyone is running on VC/PE/SWF money and so problems can be hidden for a long time.

Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.

No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn.

But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupid it was and how greedy and full of hubris the founders were. Now, everyone's trying to "change the world" and empower everyone and "enable the sharing economy" and, well you can't criticize that without sounding like a big meanie. There are a lot of web sites out there that are simply never going to be businesses. They have their runway to burn through, and once it's done, they'll be blogging about Their Amazing Journey as they get acqui-hired. But when you point this out, you're just being negative--you're a jealous wantrepreneur.

Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.

> Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.

It came off as an old timers rant, but I still enjoyed it :)

Maybe we strayed a bit too far from the "greed is good" 80's. There's nothing wrong with starting a business to make money.

It's more pervasive than just dotcoms though. I see the same things we stuff like solar roadways or hyper loop is criticized.

Too many people mistake skepticism for cynicism.

Isn't the quote "This time... will be different!!!" And then when the corn kills him again and: "That's not different at all now, is it Steve?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TMOMTtAMBI

We are all Steve and this time will not be different.

Uh, I wasn't familiar with that little tidbit of culture...

Rather, it was a reference to the fact that in the last few years, any time someone suggests that we might be in another tech bubble, there's always someone waiting to point out how "this time it's different", because now the web is mature and all the stupid startups are not really as stupid as they seem (not like in the first dot-com bubble).

Actually, it's a bit of a double entendre in that sense -- even the first dot-com bubble was rife with statements about how everything is different now, and we're in a "new economy" and all those "old economy" concepts like revenue and profit are totally obsolete. Plus ça change...