Zook (Part 2)

In concluding his work, Zook goes deeper into the dot-com boom, examining how venture capital played a pivotal role in funding the influx of start-ups that infiltrated the market in the late '90s. He points out that, instead of playing the societally-assigned role of "technological gatekeepers" as they had been for years before, they instead went madly searching about for new investments, without much thought given to the business plans and details behind the start-ups. As Zook puts it, the venture capitalists "descended into a rout of chasing companies to invest" (122).

In finishing up the text, I was glad to see that Zook did acknowledge that vision in hindsight is almost always 20/20, and that it's easy for us to say that this whole boom was based on squandering funds and hasty decisions. As Zook argues, however, many WERE convinced that the Internet would change everything for any number of industries. I don't think that the dot-com boom was really that different than any other market oversaturation that has occurred in other, offline contexts. As Zook describes it, the boom was "just another phase of the ongoing creative destruction of innovation" (150), particularly in the Bay area. This is simply the nature of capitalism -- When there is a new way of doing things, everyone jumps on it, but only those that are truly the best equipped for the long-haul (such as Yahoo, Google and Amazon) will be able to see the market through its boom and inevitable decline. In this way, the Internet marketplace isn't really that different from any other industry, and I don't think that anyone is to blame for the eventual downturn.

That said, I think that we have grown overly skeptical at this point with e-commerce ventures, as a result of the dot-com bust. The future isn't quite as bleak as Zook makes it out to be... I feel there is still a mini-boom of sorts to follow. Cyberspace does offer a lot of potential for changing the way that we do things, and I think it is only a matter of time before some of these activities become less localized in the Silicon Valleys of the world. It takes time for this technology to filter down through the social hierarchies, and as it continually grows more, there will be many opportunities to earn large amounts of revenue that we can't even envision right now.