Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Netscape's IPO & the Trouble with Memory

Excellent reality check; read the full post. You might also want to order a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith's classic "A Short History of Financial Euphoria," if you haven't read it.

It struck me today when talking to a colleague: There is an excellent chance that many of the people most excited about MySpace, social networks, etc., have no real memory of the last tech boom.

Consider: We have now passed the eleventh anniversary of the Netscape IPO that started the bubble years, and we are seven years from the peak of the bubble in the summer of 1999. People who are graduating from college today were 12 years old when Netscape went public. They were worried more about first dates and first signs of acne than about the impending upheaval in technology markets. And even when the boom ended they were still merely seventeen or so, trying to have fun while not butchering their grades so badly that they couldn't get into their first choice of universities.

Source: Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Netscape's IPO & the Trouble with Memory