Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Tech got leeway while reversible
A pass for tech
If computers turned out badly, they could be made to go away, so the innovators got room to experiment. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and others who built big tech businesses were held in high regard. Now everyone knows computers are here to stay, and AI is seen as part of the same revolution, so it gets no wait-and-see attitude. Society did not even need a bubble to pop before it began excoriating AI.
After the bubble
After the dot-com bubble popped, society disapproved of the excesses, and governments found they had popular support to reassert authority over tech companies and their investors. That put a brake on the madness. Companies started expanding into proven markets, financiers moved from speculating to investing, and entrepreneurs focused on finding applications rather than innovating the underlying technologies.
Evolutionary change
Change became more evolutionary than revolutionary, and companies gained the confidence to invest for the longer term, combining parts of the system in new ways to create value for a wider group of users. The massive overbuilding of fiber optic telecom networks during the frenzy left plenty of cheap capacity, which kept the costs of expansion down.
Why was so much fiber laid during the dot-com frenzy?
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened phone markets to competition, and carriers rushed to lay long-distance fiber. Many projected internet traffic growing far faster than it did. Wavelength-division multiplexing also let a single strand carry many times more data, so less fiber was needed than planned. Much of the cable sat unlit for years and was called dark fiber.
How did cheap fiber help later startups?
Once the glut of capacity pushed bandwidth prices down, services that needed heavy data traffic became affordable to run. YouTube launched in 2005, and Netflix began streaming video in 2007. Both relied on network capacity that had been built years earlier for the frenzy.