Dot Com to Dot Bomb

Andrew Fry talked to us about his experience in this moment in time. Andrew had a front row seat to the Internet explosion. His company Free Range Media was one of the first website design companies. During the Dot com explosion he wen from 2 employees to 30 and continued to grow. Andrew said it was insane. The only thing that seemed to matter was that you made money.

Andrew used Dinosaurs to illustrate the first internet providers: Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, Delphi and Genie. The reason he used dinosaurs is that they are large slow moving and extinct. These companies where owned by larger ones except for AOL. Prodigy was owned by Sears and IBM.  Genie was owned by GE. CompuServe was owned by H&R Block. As the internet took off these companies slowly died because they failed to innovate and adapt. Much like the dinosaurs. The ones that did where taken out by the meteor or the dot com bust.

This moment was so crazy that these companies with .com on their names became instantly worth a lot of money. InfoSource was worth more than the Boeing Corporation. The wise man looked at this and thought there was something wrong. A company like Boeing that has been in business for 90 years and the largest exporter by value in the US would be worth less than Infosource. The insanity just kept going as AOL bought TimeWarner. But like all bubbles they finally burst and lots of people lost their jobs and money. One of the fascinating things is the companies that survived. Yahoo came out of no where and became a major portal for information. Amazon.com made money and is now the largest internet retailer in the world. Google came after the bust, has risen to lead the way into the future.