Comment Re:I always come here for the gnashing of teeth (Score 1) 152
Bullshit. I was talking about adopting critical mass by the general population, not wall street.
In 95 when Netscape was climbing there was nothing but negativity. The media was saturated with stuff like what's the internet good for, the stock price is absurd, browsers are clunky and crash all the time, any search engine was limited to a small set of sites (rings), usenet is a haven for porn/bins, I'd never trust putting my credit card in a browser. Probably another 10 things on top of that.
Even Ebay was surrounded with extreme negativity when it IPOed in late '98. Why would anyone want to pay for someone else's junk and pay shipping to boot? Amazon was criticized as never being able to compete against bricks and mortar, why pay for a book to be shipped when I can go to the mall and buy it now?
The negativity among the general population slowly waned during 98-99 when the infrastructure was built out enough for people to realize that really useful stuff could be done on the internet. That was the point of the analogy in my original post.