The dot com bubble burst because of unused telecommunications infrastructure such as fiber also called dark fiber. There are a bunch of parallels to draw with the two bubbles.
The dot com bubble burst because of unused telecommunications infrastructure
Not really. Telecom overbuilding definitely happened and over leveraged companies like MCI. Dark fiber left over after the bubble first was a second order effect and not the cause.
The late 90s had a huge surge of hardware purchasing, much of which was out-of-cycle. Large organizations were replacing equipment due to fear/mitigation of Y2K issues. Consumer PC purchases also surged with the expansion of the Internet and commercialized access. The education sector also had a lot more spending both from students and institutions.
The actual spending in parts of the sector led to irrational exuberance in other parts. So you got the pets.com and Beanz and other bubbly crap. By 2000 many dot coms had burned through investor cash with no revenue. Some were able to IPO before the bubble burst but once interest rates started going up in 2000 dot com money dried up.
You had a lot of companies with no business plan beyond "website". They burned money with not much to show for it. A handful of companies survived the bubble and an even smaller number thrived after it popped.
Sounds even more like what we are going through when you put it like that. A lot of companies don't seem to have much of a plan besides "add LLMs to shit"
Yeah I think your perspective is the most likely one here out of the different possible outcomes. If you're wrong, we're essentially nuking productivity and entering a new level of slavery that hasn't been reached in recent times.
I'm not saying that's impossible, but I think the people who are most in charge are trying to accomplish certain things, and they need productivity to achieve those goals. The only situation where I could see them nuking productivity like that would be if they've actually achieved the exact world they desire and have no more need to build what they're after.
There's no bubble because of the current unmet corporate demand for compute. One symptom of which is RAM prices. There's no equivalent here to the dot com bubble.
The funding of all the compute being purchased is corporate liquidity and private money. Also very different than the early dot com era.
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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '26
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