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by yodon 3110 days ago
To answer your question, the quote about the internet supposedly lowering FedEx’s market value in the 1980’s is total nonsense.

The financial markets had zero awareness of the internet in the 1980’s (with good reason, as the Internet didn’t become commercially significant until Marc Andreesen wrote the first web browser called Mosaic in 1993 putting the internet in the hands of normal people for the first time). If we read the quote charitably and conclude they had a typo and meant to write the 1990’s it’s still nonsense as FedEx’s stock price was completely unaffected by the crash at the end of the internet boom in 2002, demonstrating the market saw no significance of the internet to FedEx’s market value, positive or negative. The market didn’t begin to think seriously about connecting the dots between FedEx and the Internet until well into the 2000’s, at which point it was clear online buying would be good for FedEx.

1 comments

yep.

I can recall 90's / early 2000's stuff about email being a concern for mail service before ecommerce was as big, but thats completely different than the 80's and ecommerce, neither of which were a thing.