John Dvorak is a big fat idiot. (ok, maybe he's not fat)

thank god Marshall Kirkpatrick already ripped Dvorak a new one on his Bubble 2.0 post... so i don't have to do a point-by-point rebuttal of his idiocy.  i was about to pound my monitor into silicon shards after reading Dvorak's crap when i saw that Marshall had already dissected it into the tumescent turditude it really is.

in short:

• "Bubble 1.0" was built on ridiculous $20-100M VC investments & retail market investor-fueled IPOs that created irrational valuations and was characterized by double-digit MMs marketing budgets & parties & Superbowl ads.

• Web 2.0 has *some* crazy VC investments, but mostly an order of magnitude (or two) smaller $'s and valuations than the 1.0 era, and exits are primarily thru M&A by large public & profitable internet platform companies with MMs of customers & billions in revenue. the marketing depts may be throwing parties, but except for Google & Techcrunch it's beer, not champagne, budgets.

while the latter scenario may certainly be getting frothy, it is NOWHERE NEAR the level of insanity of the late 90's, and the liquidity events are not being priced by grandma day traders, but rather by the execs at GOOG, YHOO, MSFT, EBAY, AMZN, AOL, IAC, NEWS & other companies with very competent CEOs & CFOs (damn, never thought i'd say that!).  many of these acquisitions have resulted in large revenue & customer acquisition opportunities, and have paid off quite well for their acquirers.

i'm not denying there are cases of over-funding and nosebleed valuations in the current era, but it ain't irrational exuberance either.

in summary: the likelihood of Bubble 2.0 flameouts is far exceeded by the likelihood of a PC Magazine flameout.  people in Publishing 1.0 houses really shouldn't throw Web 2.0 stones.

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UPDATE: really excellent & thoughtful cross-industry Bubble 2.0 analysis by Eric Norlin on Defrag blog here, talking about how there could be fallout from housing market bubble that impacts tech.  finally, some intelligent discussion on this topic.  i was probably WAAAAAY early on the housing market fallout, but i did blog about my housing market fears & selling my SF condo back in 2003.  (as usual i'm "not wrong... just REALLY early".  right ;)

Comments

[BarelyFitz]

Dvorak is not a big fat idiot, he's just a big fat troll. As usual, his asinine writings will drive a ton of hits to his site, which is his only goal.

[Charlie]

Don't you see?? That's his shtick! Cranky old dude... and now he'll get all sorts of traffic!

We should ignore him Jack Cafferty style.

[Tom]

Information overload will be the downfall of web 2.0

Only so much time and so many eyeballs.
Not enough for everyone.

Web 2.0 is an Information Bubble!

The Market can't handle all the Wannabes.

John Dvorak is a big fat RICH idiot.