10 Years After: A Look Back at the Dotcom Boom and Bust

No ecommerce company has ever made a profit. Certainly we will, and the analysts have us making a profit in 2001.
Craig Winn, CEO

What the Walkman did for music, what the cell phone did for telephony, Palm will do for your wireless data world simply being connected. Anytime, anywhere.
Carl Yankowski, CEO of Palm

STILL BUSTED
A decade after the crash, VC funding and IPOs haven't bounced back.

Posted :
Okay so maybe I'm reading this article incorrectly due to the eye- melting ugliness of the whole thing, but it LOOKS like you guys are saying harddrives cost $44 per GB in 2000.

You should hire a sophomore journalism major to teach you how to do things like fact-checking and posting things that aren't just direct PR releases for Apple and Google. Maybe go through some back issues of the magazine and try to figure out how things worked before your offices apparently filled up with nitrous oxide.

Posted by: Joanna Pearlstein
You're correct that we're saying hard drives cost about $44 per gigabyte in 2000. Why so hostile? You haven't provided your sources, but as Wired's research chief, I am happy to share ours.
(We do, by the way, hire experienced journalists to fact-check every piece in the magazine.)

Here are a few links that will back up our claim, especially when you consider -- as the story makes clear -- that we adjusted prices for inflation.
http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte
http://www.everyjoe.com/thegadgetblog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte-from-1980-to-2009/
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.html

If you need help adjusting for inflation, try the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator:
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

Thanks for reading Wired.
-Joanna Pearlstein
Senior Editor, Research WIRED Magazine

Posted:
I enjoy it thoroughly when editors hop on the comment section for a reasoned rebuttal to a snarky, malicious reader.

I enjoyed the layout, btw. I thought it playful and a homage to the times. Especially interesting is the Great Ideas, Bad Timing" section, to see how those basic ideas were untenable, but birthed some other things that have exploded in popularity. But I wonder if these things won't implode as well, and if we won't be talking about the demise of wikipedia ten years in the future due to a lack of donations.

Posted by:
Like: Joanna's response.
Hate: The layout and design of the story in the magazine. Fact- checking is not the problem here-it's the graphic design. It's playful but incredibly distracting. Print magazines should be usable just as websites should be. This design/layout is a hot mess. OK idea, poor execution.

Furthermore, I really think it was 8 pages of 'meh'. I joined the dotcom fray in 1997 (still in it) and this article failed to do the period justice. It was an unnecessary read that doesn't bring those who worked through it back in time and I doubt it provides younger folks with what things were really like.
Fail: article

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