How the Internet Happened
Page 38
2 Ibid., 22.
3 Google Groups, posted September 12, 1995, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/misc.forsale.non-computer/DxxiU7FQp8Q/8ncYwB2DDEAJ.
4 Cohen, The Perfect Store, 25.
5 Ibid., 29.
6 Ibid., 44.
7 Ibid., 55.
8 Ibid., 59.
9 Ibid., 48.
10 Ibid., 46.
11 Joshua Cooper Ramo, “The Fast-Moving Internet Economy Has a Jungle of Competitors . . . and Here’s the King,” Time, December 27, 1999.
12 Cohen, The Perfect Store, 83.
13 Ibid., 57.
14 Ibid., 64.
15 Ibid., 79.
16 Ibid., 110.
17 Casey Hait and Stephen Weiss, Digital Hustlers: Living Large and Falling Hard in Silicon Alley (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 47.
18 Ibid., 46.
19 Silicon Alley Reporter, no. 16 (Summer 1998), 38.
20 Hait and Weiss, Digital Hustlers, 115.
21 Internet History Podcast, Episode 91: Co-Founder of Feed Magazine, Stefanie Syman, December 7, 2015.
22 Internet History Podcast, Episode 107: Founder of Marketwatch, Larry Kramer @lkramer, May 22, 2016.
23 David Plotz, “A Slate Timeline,” Slate, June 19, 2006; accessed January 31, 2018, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slates_10th_anniversary/2006/06/a_slate_timeline.html.
24 Stephen P. Bradley and Erin E. Sullivan, AOL Time Warner, Inc., Harvard Business School Case Study 9-702-421, June 23, 2005.
25 Internet History Podcast, Episode 62: iVillage Co-Founder Nancy Evans, April 27, 2015.
26 Ibid.
27 Internet History Podcast, Episode 64: GeoCities Founder David Bohnett, May 11, 2015.
28 Eric Ransdell, “Broadcast.com Boosts Its Signal,” Fast Company, August 1998.
29 Mike Sager, “The Billionaire,” Esquire, April 1, 2000.
30 Ransdell, “Broadcast.com Boosts Its Signal.”
31 Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley (New York: Broadway, 2000), 78.
32 Po Bronson, “Hotmale,” Wired, December 1, 1998.
33 Karen Angel, Inside Yahoo!: Reinvention and the Road Ahead (New York: John Wiley, 2002), 86.
34 Ibid., 89.
35 PR Newswire, “April Internet Ratings from Nielsen//NetRatings,” May 11, 1999, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/April+Internet+Ratings+From+Nielsen%2F%2FNetRatings.-a054609261.
36 Gordon Gould, “Search and Destroy,” Silicon Alley Reporter, no. 16 (Summer 1998).
37 Jim Evans, “Portals in a Storm,” Industry Standard, December 28, 1998–January 4, 1999.
38 Angel, Inside Yahoo!, 93.
39 Ibid., 131.
40 Ibid., 80.
41 Michael Krantz, “Start Your Engines: Excite and Yahoo, the Two Leading Web-Search Sites, Race to Remake Themselves into Portals,” Time, April 20, 1998.
42 Linda Himelstein, Heather Green, Richard Siklos, and Catherine Yang, “Yahoo! The Company, the Strategy, the Stock,” BusinessWeek, August 27, 1998.
8. BLOWING BUBBLES: THE DOT-COM ERA
1 John Cassidy, Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 28.
2 John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria (New York: Whittle Books in association with Viking, 1993), 87.
3 Internet History Podcast, Episode 67: Journalist Maggie Mahar Discusses the Dot-com Bubble, June 1, 2015.
4 Roger Lowenstein, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 103.
5 Cassidy, Dot.Con, 107.
6 Charles Fishman, “The Revolution Will Be Televised (on CNBC),” Fast Company, June 2000.
7 Internet History Podcast, Episode 67: Journalist Maggie Mahar Discusses the Dot-com Bubble.
8 Andy Serwar, “A Nation of Traders,” Fortune, October 11, 1999.
9 Maggie Mahar, Bull! A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982–2004 (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003), 257.
10 Cassidy, Dot.Con, 200.
11 Ibid., 200.
12 Ibid., 201.
13 Mahar, Bull!, 292.
14 Ibid., xviii.
15 Joseph Nocera and Tyler Maroney, “Do You Believe? How Yahoo! Became a Blue Chip,” Fortune, June 7, 1999.
16 Cassidy, Dot.Con, 162.
17 Jim Rohwer, “The Numbers Game,” Fortune, November 22, 1999.
18 Mahar, Bull!, 263.
19 Federal Reserve Board, “Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan,” December 5, 1996, https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm.
20 Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (New York: Penguin, 2016), 741.
21 Justin Martin, Greenspan: The Man Behind the Money (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2000), 226.
22 Mahar, Bull!, 6.
23 Ibid., 170.
24 Amy Kover, “Dot-com Time Bomb on Madison Avenue,” Fortune, December 6, 1999.
25 Bethany McLean, “More Than Just Dot-coms,” Fortune, December 6, 1999; Anthony B. Perkins and Michael C. Perkins, The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks—And What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 6.
26 Brent Goldfarb, Michael Pfarrer, and David Kirsch, “Searching for Ghosts: Business Survival, Unmeasured Entrepreneurial Activity and Private Equity Investment in the Dot-com Era” (working paper RHS-06-027, Social Science Research Network, Rochester, SSRN-id929845, 2005, accessed March 26, 2017; downloadable at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=825687).
27 John Cassidy, “Striking It Rich: The Rise and Fall of Popular Capitalism,” New Yorker, January 14, 2002.
28 Mark Gimein, “Around the Globe, Net Stock Mania,” Industry Standard, December 28, 1998–January 4, 1999.
9. IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE: THE DOT-COM BUBBLE
1 Peter Elkind, “The Hype Is Big, Really Big, at Priceline,” Fortune, September 6, 1999.
2 David Noonan, “Price Is Right,” Industry Standard, December 28, 1998–January 4, 1999.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Elkind, “The Hype Is Big, Really Big, at Priceline.”
6 Ibid.
7 Todd Woody, “Idea Man,” Industry Standard, June 28, 1999.
8 Randall E. Stross, eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 120; Woody, “Idea Man.”
9 Woody, “Idea Man.”
10 Elkind, “The Hype Is Big, Really Big, at Priceline.”
11 Ibid.
12 Dyan Machan, “An Edison for a New Age,” Forbes, May 17, 1999.
13 Theta Pavis, “Toys ‘R’ Online,” Digital Coast Reporter, no. 3 (October 1998).
14 Miguel Helft, “Uncle of the Board,” Industry Standard, December 27, 1999–January 3, 2000.
15 Jacob Ward, “EToys ‘R’ Us?” Industry Standard, May 31–June 7, 1999.
16 Omar Merlo, Pets.com Inc.: Rise and Decline of a Pet Supply Retailer, Harvard Business Review Case Study 909A21, September 15, 2009.
17 Tim Clark, “Amazon Invests in Online Pet Store,” CNET News, March 29, 1999, http://news.cnet.com/Amazon-invests-in-online-pet-store/2100-1017_3-223621.html.
18 Philip J. Kaplan, F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 16.
19 Ibid., 21.
20 Securities and Exchange Commission, Webvan Group, Inc., Form 424B1, Prospectus filed with SEC, accessed February 9, 2018, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1092657/000089161899004914/0000891618-99-004914.txt; Stross, eBoys, 36; Randall Stross, “Only a Bold Gamble Can Save Webvan Now,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2001; and Scott Simon, “Profile: Online Shopping with Webvan,” Weekend Edition (National Public Radio), October 9, 1999.
21 Linda Himelstein, “Louis H. Borders,” BusinessWeek, September 27, 1999; and Himelstein, “Can You Sell Groceries Like Books?” BusinessWeek, August 26, 1999.
22 Andrew McA
fee and Mona Ashiya, Webvan, Harvard Business Review Case Study 9-602-037, February 14, 2002.
23 Ibid.
24 Himelstein, “Can You Sell Groceries Like Books?”
25 Carolyn Said, “Online Beats In Line / Buying Groceries on the Web Takes the Hassle out of Shopping,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1999.
26 Stross, “Only a Bold Gamble Can Save Webvan Now.”
27 Rusty Weston, “Return of the Milkman,” Upside, April 1, 2000.
28 McAfee and Ashiya, Webvan.
29 Securities and Exchange Commission, Webvan Group, Inc., Form 10-Q, accessed February 9, 2018, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1092657/000089161800002826/0000891618-00-002826.txt; and Kara Swisher, “Webvan Needs Fresh Ideas to Help Bring Home Bacon,” Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2000.
30 Saul Hansell, “Some Hard Lessons for Online Grocer,” New York Times, February 19, 2001.
31 Arlene Weintraub and Robert D. Hof, “For Online Pet Stores, It’s Dog-Eat-Dog,” BusinessWeek, March 6, 2000.
32 Laurie Freeman, “Pets.com Socks It to Competitors,” Ad Age, November 29, 1999, via Factiva, accessed November 17, 2008.
33 “Death of a Spokespup,” Adweek, New England edition, December 2000.
34 Weintraub and Hof, “For Online Pet Stores, It’s Dog-Eat-Dog.”
35 Mike Tarsala, “Pets.com Killed by Sock Puppet,” MarketWatch.com, November 8, 2000, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sock-puppet-kills-petscom.
36 Freeman, “Pets.com Socks It to Competitors”; Tarsala, “Pets.com Killed by Sock Puppet.”
37 Thomas Eisenmann, “Petstore.com,” HBS No. 801-044 (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2000), p. 9.
38 Stross, eBoys, 116
39 Julia Flynn, “Gap Exists Between Entrepreneurship in Europe, North America, Study Shows,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 1999.
40 Stross, eBoys, 63.
41 Anthony B. Perkins and Michael C. Perkins, The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks—And What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 38.
42 John Cassidy, Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 237.
43 Stross, eBoys, xvii.
44 Roger Lowenstein, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 101, 112.
45 “Financial Spotlight: Net IPOs Lose Their Luster,” Industry Standard, June 28, 1999.
46 Lowenstein, Origins of the Crash, 125.
47 “Yahoo! Buys GeoCities,” CNNMoney, January 28, 1999. http://money.cnn.com/1999/01/28/technology/yahoo_a/.
48 Stephan Paternot, A Very Public Offering: A Rebel’s Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning (New York: J Wiley, 2001), 172.
49 Perkins and Perkins, The Internet Bubble (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 21.
50 “Excite@Home Buys Online Greeting Card Site for $780 Million,” CNET, January 2, 2002, https://www.cnet.com/news/excitehome-buys-online-greeting-card-site-for-780-million/.
51 “Excite@Home to Acquire Bluemountain,” New York Times, October 26, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/26/business/excite-home-to-acquire-bluemountain.html.
52 “Will K-Tel’s Stock Fizzle?” CNET, June 10, 1998, https://www.cnet.com/news/will-k-tels-stock-fizzle/.
53 Ernst Malmsten, Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe (London: Random House Business Books, 2001), 111.
54 Kaplan, F’d Companies, 24.
55 Ibid., 34.
56 Ibid., 38.
57 “Pixelon.com Announces iBash ’99,” InterActive Agency, Inc., October 27, 1999, http://www.alanwallace.com/iagency/public_relations/archives/1999/pixelon.10.27.99.html.
58 David Kirkpatrick, “Suddenly Pseudo,” New York, December 20, 1999, accessed February 1, 2018, at http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/internet/1703/.
59 Casey Hait and Stephen Weiss, Digital Hustlers: Living Large and Falling Hard in Silicon Alley (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 267.
60 Wired Staff, “Steaming Video,” Wired, November 1, 2000.
61 Hait and Weiss, Digital Hustlers, 240.
62 Corrie Driebusch, “Drkoop.com Epitomized Hype of Tech Boom and Bust,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2015.
63 James Ledbetter, “The Final Frontier for Lou Dobbs?” Industry Standard, June 21, 1999.
64 Kirin Kalia, “A Giant Leap for Web-Kind,” Silicon Alley Reporter, no. 28 (1999).
65 Gail Shister, “Sam Donaldson Enjoys Internet Interview Show,” Chicago Tribune, January 1, 2000.
66 Joshua Cooper Ramo, “The Fast-Moving Internet Economy Has a Jungle of Competitors . . . and Here’s the King,” Time, December 27, 1999.
67 James Kelly, “That Man in the Cardboard Box,” Time, December 27, 1999.
68 Joshua Quittner, “An Eye on the Future,” Time, December 27, 1999.
69 David Kirkpatrick, “Is Net Investing a Sucker’s Game?” Fortune, October 11, 1999.
70 Justin Fox, “Net Stock Rules: Masters of a Parallel Universe,” Fortune, June 7, 1999.
71 Jacqueline Doherty, “Amazon.bomb,” Barron’s, May 31, 1999.
72 Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), 100.
73 Ibid., 101.
10. POP!: NETSCAPE VS. MICROSOFT, AOL + TIME WARNER AND THE NUCLEAR WINTER
1 David B. Yoffie and Mary Kwak, “The Browser Wars, 1994–1998,” Harvard Business School Case 798-094 (June 1998), 9.
2 Kara Swisher, “After a Life at Warp Speed, Netscape Quickly Logs Off,” Wall Street Journal, November 25, 1998.
3 David Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano, Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft (New York: Free Press, 1998), 9.
4 Ibid., 9.
5 Ibid., 33.
6 Ibid., 38.
7 Yoffie and Kwak, “The Browser Wars,” 9; Eric Nee, “Up for Grabs?” Fortune, February 23, 1998.
8 Yoffie and Kwak, “The Browser Wars,” 14.
9 Kenneth S. Corts and Deborah Freier, “A Brief History of the Browser Wars,” Harvard Business School Case 9-703-517 (2003), 6.
10 “Netscape Breaks Free,” Economist, March 28, 1998.
11 Nee, “Up for Grabs?”
12 John Heilemann, Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 199.
13 Ken Auletta, World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies (New York: Random House, 2001), 362.
14 Charles Arthur, Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet (Philadelphia: Kogan, 2012), 22.
15 “List of Public Corporations by Market Capitalization,” Wikipedia, last modified January 23, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization.
16 Joe Steinbring, “How Many Personal Computers Are Sold per Year?” accessed February 1, 2018, https://steinbring.net/2011/how-many-personal-computers-are-sold-per-year/.
17 U.S. Census Bureau, “Computer and Internet Use in the United States: Population Characteristics,” issued May 2013, http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-569.pdf.
18 Internet History Podcast, Episode 8: Aleks Totic, of Mosaic and Netscape.
19 Auletta, World War 3.0, 197.
20 Jared Sandberg, “WorldCom Agrees to Acquire CompuServe for $1.2 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1997.
21 Nina Munk, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 118.
22 Marc Gunther, “AOL: The Future King of Advertising?” Fortune, October 11, 1999.
23 Munk, Fools Rush In, 118.
24 Marc Gunther, Liz Smith, and Wilton Woods, “The Internet Is Mr. Case’s Neighborhood,” Fortune, March 30, 1998, accessed February 1, 2018, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/03/30/240097/index.htm.
25 Gunther, “AOL: The Future King o
f Advertising?”
26 “AOL, Drkoop.com Partner,” CNNMoney, July 6, 1999, accessed February 1, 2018, http://money.cnn.com/1999/07/06/technology/aol/.
27 Kara Swisher, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future (New York: Crown, 2003), 62.
28 Ibid., 109, 117.
29 Munk, Fools Rush In, 106.
30 Gary Rivlin, “AOL’s Rough Riders,” Industry Standard, October 30, 2000.
31 Munk, Fools Rush In, 153.
32 Justin Fox, “Net Stock Rules: Masters of a Parallel Universe,” Fortune, June 7, 1999; Swisher, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere, 119.
33 Munk, Fools Rush In, 118, 123.
34 Swisher, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere, 128.
35 Munk, Fools Rush In, 125.
36 Swisher, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere, 141.
37 Ibid., 154.
38 Ibid., 141.
39 Munk, Fools Rush In, 118.
40 Daniel Okrent, Maryanne Murray Buechner, Adam Cohen, Emily Mitchell, Michael Krantz, and Chris Taylor, “Happily Ever After?” Time, January 24, 2000.
41 Ibid.
42 Swisher, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere, 155.
43 John Cassidy, Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 283.
44 “The Greatest Defunct Web Sites and Dotcom Disasters,” CNET, June 5, 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20080607211840/http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,39029477,49296926-6,00.htm.
45 Jim Edwards, “One of the Kings of the ’90s Dot-com Bubble Now Faces 20 Years in Prison,” Business Insider, December 6, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/where-are-the-kings-of-the-1990s-dot-com-bubble-bust-2016-12/#petscoms-greg-mclemore-raised-121-million-from-investors-but-lost-money-on-every-sale-7.
46 Cassidy, Dot.Con, 273.
47 Ibid., 306.
48 Ibid., 292.
49 David Kleinbard, “The $1.7 Trillion Dot.com Lesson,” CNNMoney, November 9, 2000, http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/.
50 Zhu Wang, “Technological Innovation and Market Turbulence: The Dot-com Experience,” Review of Economic Dynamics 10, no. 1 (2007): 78, 79.
51 Don Clark, “PayPal Files for an IPO, Testing a Frosty Market,” Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2001.
52 Saul Hansell, “Some Hard Lessons for Online Grocer,” New York Times, February 19, 2001.