Maples: Yes, There's a Bubble

Hey maybe peak oil will be way worse than we anticipated and it'll turn out that this whole capitalism thing was in fact a huge bubble.

This is a great phrase, but I think it should be "the nearest boolean" unless he was trying to be clever.

However, this isn't 1999 anymore. The amount of real value in internet business is huge today, and the industry is more mature. Web companies take in hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue and the longest lived have been profitable for a decade or more. Meanwhile, though valuations are occasionally high the craziness from the first dot-com bubble has been much tempered. Investors aren't dumping millions into niche companies with no revenues, no history, and no business plan, they might be making risky bets from time to time but the risk is much reduced from the wild west era. Overall these factors add up to bubble protection measures. It's simply much harder for a true speculative dot-com bubble to build up and to burst.

Instead we'll likely see dot-com companies meld into the same pattern as traditional companies, as sane investing takes hold and subject matter expertise becomes more common. Every industry, no matter how old, goes through periods of boom and bust, but generally the amplitude of these fluctuations is small enough for the economy to handle it.

I'm highly skeptical of Zynga because I haven't seen any evidence that they can innovate at all. I suspect people will tire of grind games, and I wonder if Zynga will be able to adapt. Maybe that's just my wishful thinking, that my family will abandon its addiction...