[hn_throwaway_99]

> Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done

Literally who wondered that? Drives me nuts when people start off an argument with an obvious strawman. I remember the time period of 2005-2007 very well, and I don't remember a single person, at least in tech, thinking the Internet was done. I don't know, maybe some ragebait articles were written about it, but being knee-deep in web tech at that time, I remember the general feeling is that it was pretty obvious there was tons to do. E.g. we didn't necessarily know what form mobile would take, but it was obvious to most folks that the tech was extremely immature and that it would have a huge impact on the Internet as it progressed. That's just one example - social media was still in its nascent stages then so it was obvious there would be a ton of work around that as well.

[nostrademons]

If you were in tech in 2005-2007 you were part of a small minority of the general population. It often didn't feel like a small minority because, well, you knew all those other people on the Internet, but that's a pretty strong selection bias.

There is, of course, the Paul Krugman quote from 1998 that by 2005 the Internet would be no more important than a fax machine. [1]

Here's Wired in 2007 saying, in reference to Facebook, "no company in its right mind would give it a $15 billion valuation". [2]

I remember, being at Google in ~2011, we used to laugh at the Wall Street analysts because they would focus on CPC numbers to forecast a valuation, which is important only if the number of clicks is remaining constant. We knew, of course that total Internet usage was still growing quite rapidly and that queries had increased by roughly 4x over the 2009-2013 timeframe.

And a lot of people will say "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?", and I'll point out that many people who assumed the Internet had lots of room to grow in 2005-2007 did end up very rich. Google stock has increased roughly 20x since 2007 (and 40x from its 2009 lows). Meta is now worth $1.6T, a 100x increase over the $15B valuation that everyone thought was insane in 2007. Amazon is also up about 100x. It would not be possible to take the other side of the trade and make these kind of profits if the majority of people did not think the Internet was largely over.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...

[2] https://www.wired.com/2007/10/facebook-future/

[lamasery]

> If you were in tech in 2005-2007 you were part of a small minority of the general population. It often didn't feel like a small minority because, well, you knew all those other people on the Internet, but that's a pretty strong selection bias.

Didn't we only pass 50% of households having a home PC in like... '00 or '01 or something? And I mean just in the US, which was way ahead of the curve.

> Here's Wired in 2007 saying, in reference to Facebook, "no company in its right mind would give it a $15 billion valuation". [2]

I actually think that's correct... if the smartphone hadn't taken off right after that. The "consumer" Internet and computing, the attention economy, et c., functionally is the smartphone. A desktop computer and even a laptop aren't in use when driving, at the store, at the park, every moment on vacation, et c. It'd still only be nerds lugging computers everywhere if nobody'd managed to make a smartphone that's capable-enough and pleasant-enough-to-use to expand the market beyond the set of folks who might have had a beeper in earlier years (the part of the market Blackberry was addressing). A gigantic proportion of the "GDP of the Internet", if you will, exists because smartphones exist.

[fragmede]

I'm reminded of the quote that ATMs didn't unemploy bank tellers, smartphones did. While not owning a laptop may seem inconceivable to us here, smartphones exist as the only connection to the Internet for many.

The interesting question is without Apple and the iPhone, would RIM/Blackberry have "figured it out"? Would we be on 2-way "pagers" with keyboards and stupidly expensive data plans that you have to order separately? Because while the original iphone was a marvel in terms of hardware, I think the bidet contribution was the integration with AT&T for the cellphone plan, which only Steve Jobs had the clout to pull off.

[magicalist]

> I don't know, maybe some ragebait articles were written about it, but being knee-deep in web tech at that time, I remember the general feeling is that it was pretty obvious there was tons to do

Almost definitely professional ragebaiters in Wired or Time or whatever, yeah.

[Maxatar]

I was also in tech at that time, in fact I worked for Google during that period and people definitely thought that the Internet had reached its peak. So many criticisms back then not about just peak Internet but that all these companies were blowing money on unproven business models, they were unsustainable, unprofitable, it was all just hype.

You also had numerous telecommunications companies going bust in one of the largest sector collapses in modern financial history, the largest bankruptcy in history (at that time) was WorldCom, followed by the second largest bankruptcy in history with Global Crossing... Lucent Technologies went belly up and the largest telecom company at the time Nortel lost 90% of its value, eventually going bankrupt in 2009.

And then of course the great recession hit, tech companies took a massive blow, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple and other tech giants lost 50% of their stock value in a matter of months. You don't lose 50% of your value because people think you have a promising future.

It wouldn't be until the explosive rise of smart phones and close to zero percent interest rates that sentiment turned around and tech companies ballooned in value in what would end up being the longest bull run in U.S. history.