Comment by hnfong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnfong | Hacker News Reader

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I still think it was different in the early 2000s, even after the dot com bubble.

"Big Tech" had not been assembled yet. Microsoft was the only tech megacorp in town, and they were _hated_ back then. Apple was still recovering from shambles. Google was a startup nobody heard of. Facebook wasn't a thing yet.

Tech investment money wasn't on the same scale as today. Money was measured in millions instead of the billions today. Most of the money I think was still towards finance at the time. If you look at the public companies with largest market cap before 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ), you'll see there's quite a couple banks on the list.

You're absolutely correct though that this trend was foreseeable in the 1990s. Which is kinda why the dot-com boom/bust happened -- everyone knew it was the future, I guess people were just a bit too excited for the future, and the companies who'd actually create that future weren't even founded yet, leading to all the mis-investment and subsequent bust.

Not exactly true, big tech did exist it was just different players. Sun was a strong player, as they were pushing Java, that was very popular in the enterprise world. Intel was considered a place that did a lot of interesting innovation. IBM/Oracle style players.

I think the big difference was that big tech was mostly on enterprise. The big shift to consumer focused big tech made a lot of the big tech more intersting place to work

> Google was a startup nobody heard of

This is not true in the early 2000s - I remember people at school (UK) using Google in the late 90s.

People forget that "the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed".

I also discovered Google in 1999, and then worked there a decade later. I remember listening to the earnings calls around 2011-2012, and my coworkers would express disbelief in the questions that financial analysts would ask, because they totally missed the key drivers of our business performance. "It's simple," someone older and wiser told me, "they assume that the Internet is tapped out, no more people are going to go online, and so the only possible driver of higher revenue is higher cost per click." In reality, search queries increased 4x between 2009-2012. Large numbers of people were still discovering the Internet for the first time in the early 2010s. Hell, large numbers of people are still discovering the Internet for the first time now - Google still has a "next billion users" initiative (largely focused on India and South/Southeast Asia), and only about 35% of the world population are Internet users.

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