Re:RIP Good Times (2008)
by jghn on Thursday May 19, 2022 @06:32PM
(#31441024)
This is where I worry. My recollection of how the dot com crash unfolded was that first the bogus startups folded as expected. But they're part of a larger food chain. There were other b2b companies who had them as customers. And now they're out of money so they fold. Which affects other companies. And so on.
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I often wonder which companies are Sun and Oracle this time around. Sun was doing a ton of revenue to companies with extremely marginal future prospects as the dotcom took off.
Amazon perhaps, though they have successfully penetrated enterprises.
I think we have to be careful with some of this narrative being a bit too neat.
I suspect Sun was walking dead long before the crash, and wouldn't have survived without an existential shift that it's not clear they were capable of making.
The silly money in the dot-com run up just dragged the process out a bit by masking/hiding the crisis, but I don't think it's correct to say the crash is what killed them.
Yeah probably not Amazon. Sun already seemed a bit on the outside looking in at that point. It could potentially be Oracle. Sure they're in a stronger position than Sun was at that point but there's a similar aspect of having lost mindshare in terms of the go to product in their class.
Few understand the domino effect.
A smaller domino can topple a much bigger one, which can topple a bigger one and so on.