The Dot.com boom was a moment in time where any company that had a website and tried to go pubic basically did, and got a lot of investing and interest around it. However, this caused a huge negative effect on the market once the bubble bursted, and everyone realized that the .com's where not actually that special.
There was five stages to the Dot.com bust, the innocence beginning, boom, insanity, bust, and the crawl back to sanity. Each stage was a time in the market where the market was learning about the technology and how it changed.
It started out in the early 90's where the Internet was live, but the browser GUI was born. When the GUI was being shown to investors and other people of interests, people realized that this was going to be the future of the world. So people started investing early into these technologies. The big players at the time was Prodigy, CompuServ, Genie, AOL, and Delphi.
Next was the boom, where more bigger companies came into play. The internet has become something that people can use so more companies doing more things come about. Like Netscape, Amazon, Yahoo, USWeb, and so on. This helped further the boom and make the companies worth even more.
Insanity happened next. At this moment there was so many companies that where going public that people were investing in that had no actual value. There burn rate was so high compared to their profits that they didn't make any money but kept getting investments. This is the point in time where people started to realize that these .com's weren't actually special or doing anything to generate revenue.
Then the bust came. All the investors started to pull out because they realized the .com's weren't getting them their money back. This left a lot of companies to go under since now all the revenue from funding was gone.
Eventually the web comes back and actual websites start to make profit as a business. At this time we see companies like Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, and Expedia come alive and make money. Once this happens the investors start to return and the market stabilizes. We also see a lot of acquisitions like MySpace being bought by Murdoch for 580 million, and YouTube being bought by google for 1.65 billion.
The 90's were truly a weird time for the market and the internet as it started to mature into an actual business and make money. In the end it came out with some awesome websites and business that we can't imagine not having today, but the road leading to today was a bit rough. Those are the sacrifices that are made when a new market is formed, winners and losers.
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