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Cranky Tech Journalist Thinks Another Bust Is Coming

by Terrence O'Brien on August 6, 2007 at 10:54 AM

Dot Bomb BustOh Cranky Pants, will you ever run out of things to be bitter about. John Dvorak is quickly becoming tech journalism's old man on the porch... with a shot gun. With columns such as 'Down With Dumbing Down,' 'Shut Up About the iPhone Already,' and 'Is Everyone Over 30 Useless?,' it's no wonder we've simply taken to referring to him as 'Cranky Pants.'

His latest article should be called "What's the Point," but he decided to go with a slightly less downbeat headline, 'Bubble 2.0 Coming Soon.' Dvorak talks about the encroaching second dot-com bust as if Google were the anti-Christ. The first bust will pale in comparison, according to Dvorak. He also points out the endless series of busts through out the history of the home computing industry, the CD ROM bust, the IBM clone bust, and the software wars. We'd hardly call some of these things honest to goodness "busts," but if you can strip away the layers of nay-saying there is kernel of truth here.

Do we need so many social networks? Does every Web site have to have social networking features? How many YouTube competitors can the Internet marketplace possibly support? And how much do we really need mobile access to everything?

It is inevitable that these markets will shrink, and some form of deflation is coming. But Cranky Pants' fatalistic attitude almost seems to question whether the whole thing was worth while, which is a really easy question to answer... Yes, yes it was.

From Slashdot and PC Magazine

Related links:

Tags: bubble, burst, bust, web 2.0, Web2.0

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