Bubble 2.0, Fish, and Dirty Words

[jmiller]

Don't say it. Don't even think it. Yes, it's a six-letter word, not four, but to dotcom entrepreneurs, is has the same effect the "C-word" has on Mom. Bubble. D'oh! Don't say that!

David Hornik, on his VentureBlog, was brave enough to dub the current business environment Bubble 2.0, a term that has caught some wind in the blogosphere, carrying with it a punch-in-the-gut memory of Bubble 1.0, the original dotcom bust.

Why does Hornik think the Bubble is back?

"[T]here are a large number of ‘companies' being created again for the express purpose of being acquired. I certainly have seen it. I have met with companies that clearly state their intention to be acquired by Yahoo or Google or, in a pinch, Interactive Corp.," writes Hornik.

And then you piece together the wellspring of recent activity where startups are getting swallowed up by the behemoths of the industry, all of whom managed to survive the first dotcom bust. Notice, the use of the word "first," as all things that go up, come down.

Ebay buys Skype for a lot of money. A stinkin' lot of money. The move was widely criticized and met chilly response on Wall Street. Nobody's sure exactly what eBay plans to do with it.

"There seems to be very little in the way of real synergies between the two companies at all. About the only thing this suggests is that eBay is worried that it's existing business is in trouble and it needs help fast -- and apparently the best way to do that is to significantly overpay for a VoIP offering with too much hype," writes Mike a TechDirt.

MySpace.com rockets to the 4th most visited domain on the Internet and is soon acquired (through Intermix) by Rupert "Mu-ha-ha-ha" Murdoch's News Corp. Weblogs, Inc. finds itself stepping from caviar dreams as AOL tosses a reported $25 million at Jason Calacanis. VeriSign picks up pinging service Weblogs (not to be confused with Weblogs, Inc.).

A trend is emerging that has many unnerved. The big fish are eating up little fish everywhere, which is, in some weird twisted fish analogy, spawning scores of imitation little fish. But what happens when the big fish are full up? Something weirder in this analogy happens: the little fish bursts. Sorry for that (I did fairly well on the analogy section of my SAT's, even if it doesn't show here).

Writing Tip #234: When an analogy doesn't work, ditch it.

Basically the best of the startups are acquired, leaving the rest to flounder (heh, fish pun). GEMAYA, a super conglomerate acronym coined by David Kirkpatrick consisting of Google, eBay, MSN, Amazon, Yahoo!, AOL, is that much closer to reality.

Andrew Orlowski provides a detailed "reality-based" guide to Bubble 2.0 over at the Register. Get your Bubble 2.0 tee shirt here.