The rose is off the boom of the New Economy. Yesterday’s dot com success stories are turning into today’s dot bomb pink slips. 8,329 people were laid off from wired work in November alone, and the bloodletting may have just begun. So where do unemployed netizens go once the mouse clicks stop? The e-mail joke of the day is that b2b no longer means “business-to-business e-commerce”, but “back to banking.” The so-called irrational exuberance that helped rocket the Internet industry into stock market stardom in the 1990s is now a kind of anxious rationalism that threatens a recession in the economy as a whole.
The days of venture capitalists handing millions of dollars to brazen 25-year olds with shaky business plans are over. The question is, are the real innovations of Internet entrepreneurs the essential ingredient to America’s economic prowess? The World Wide Wipeout is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
William Sahlman, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, and Marc Sason, an Online & Print Writer/Editor/Researcher